[HN Gopher] Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20B
Author : moritzplassnig
Score : 533 points
Date : 2021-04-12 12:48 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| sam_goody wrote:
| What will this mean for Apple? Aside for Siri, Nuance voice is
| used for the Mac TTS engine, which I use quite heavily.
|
| In English, there are quite a few contenders for TTS, eg. Amazon.
| Apple can find another vendor. But in some languages it is Google
| voice or Nuance and there are no other games in town.
| varispeed wrote:
| So Microsoft can see your private repositories, your documents if
| you use Office, your personal files (one drive), your company
| communication (teams), now they will be able to listen what you
| talk about. Where is this going? Should we trust this company so
| much? I think companies like this should be split up.
| severino wrote:
| Well, they have been doing that for ages already, remember they
| hold a monopoly on the personal computer operating system
| software. Of course now it isn't as easy as it used to be as
| they couldn't just force IE and Bing into everybody's phone,
| but they're working on it.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| And the worst part, the deal is likely going to be approved (or
| they would not be announcing it). There's just _no way in hell_
| the current political landscape allows "splitting up" a company
| when it is still allowing to grow it even further.
| [deleted]
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Years ago, deep in the fine-print of the Skype ToU, was buried
| a clause in which anything you discussed via Skype granted to
| MS a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, etc. license to
| anything mentioned. Is that still there? (Haven't used Skype in
| many a long year, myself.) I always wondered why that clause
| didn't render Skype unusable for any business or prospective
| business conversation.
| habeebtc wrote:
| There was 2 Skypes. Skype and Skype for business.
|
| I can believe this ToU for the former.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| No, that is standard language that gives a website the right
| to store and display content you post to it (e.g., to show
| your avatar on a profile page or show forum posts or chats.)
| Many websites use it; see this search for examples: https://w
| ww.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22any%20time%20you%20...
|
| This is the text from Skype's terms: "Notwithstanding any
| rights or obligations governed by the Additional Terms (as
| defined below) if, at any time you choose to upload or post
| User Submissions to the Skype Websites or through the
| Software (excluding Reports and excluding the content of your
| communications) you automatically grant Skype a non-
| exclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual,
| sub-licensable and transferable license of all rights to use,
| edit, modify, include, incorporate, adapt, record, publicly
| perform, display, transmit and reproduce the User Submissions
| including, without limitation, all trade marks associated
| therewith, in connection with the Skype Websites and Skype's
| Software and Products including for the purpose of promoting
| or redistributing part or all of the Skype Websites and/or
| the Software or Products, in any and all media now known or
| hereafter devised. You also hereby grant each user of the
| Skype Website and/or Skype's Software or Products a non-
| exclusive license to access your User Submission through the
| Skype Website and/or Software or Products and to use, copy,
| distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform and
| transmit such User Submissions solely as permitted through
| the functionality of the Skype Websites and/or Software or
| Products and pursuant to these Terms of Use. In addition, you
| waive any so-called "moral rights" in and to the User
| Submissions, to the extent permitted by applicable law."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So, those are both necessary terms due to the US asinine
| idea that copying data within a system is covered by
| copyrights, and general enough terms that allow MS to do
| anything they want with any content you send through Skype.
|
| I don't see how the GP is incorrect. But I also don't see
| how MS could improve anything here.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I'm sure Microsoft could survive a court challenge. That
| is not the same as saying getting agreement on this has
| no value to them.
|
| The user was incorrect because they said, "anything you
| discussed via Skype granted to MS a worldwide, royalty-
| free, sublicensable, etc. license to anything mentioned"
| in the context of their parent comment that said, "now
| they will be able to listen what you talk about. Where is
| this going?" These terms have nothing to do with
| listening to your conversations and they don't grant any
| rights to them.
|
| That's not to say Microsoft won't ask for such licensing
| in the future.
| kyberias wrote:
| I find that very hard to believe.
| 3v1n0 wrote:
| I agree, not that different from Google either.
| astrea wrote:
| But Microsoft won't see as much scrutiny as any other tech
| giant because they are so deeply ingrained in the
| government's world.
| berkes wrote:
| And when they are scrutinized, that most probably puts the
| scrutinizers themselves in a difficult position.
|
| The report in which the organization explains why
| Microsofts products are privacy invading, monopolized or
| otherwise breaching some law or regulation, that report
| itself is most probably written on those Microsoft
| products.
| andrew_v4 wrote:
| One difference I've found between MS and Google: MS is much
| more annoying about everything they do. (Hear me out)
|
| I'd be surprised if there is any real difference in how
| either company respects your privacy (neither does). But for
| the most part, google seems to do its thing in the background
| and leave you alone. Microsoft is constantly popping things
| up asking you to rate this or that, flinging things you
| didn't ask for onto your screen, basically the spirit of
| clippy reborn into modern data collection practices. If I'm
| going to have my information exploited no matter what I do,
| I'd rather at least have it happen unobtrusively.
|
| (To be fair, this is just my perception. I was in a g-suite
| shop for three years and now onto office 365 and I _feel_
| like it bothers me about stuff way more often the g-suite
| ever did)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Microsoft is annoying while Google is creepy. I'm annoyed
| by the dark pattern designs used by Microsoft, but Google
| will remember things that you about yourself that you
| didn't at moments when you didn't ask for help. It's creepy
| because you'd rather not know that a company has that
| amount of data on your life.
| aloisdg wrote:
| Or Amazon
| 3v1n0 wrote:
| Well amazon can't be neither compared in this, is by far
| way more _evil_. At least Google and MS keep some key
| products open source, so most of them can be checked and
| re-packaged if there are privacy concerns.
| 2ion wrote:
| Buy the stock and enjoy the ride.
| zentiggr wrote:
| So you've seen the move "The Circle"? Complete transparency
| for everyone then?
| newbie578 wrote:
| I'm just curious, do you and the people who agree with you
| think that Apple should also be split up?
|
| I personally am more Microsoft friendly, simply for the reason
| that they always had and have an open platform to everyone.
|
| I'm honestly interested in people's experiences and views on
| this topic.
| zentiggr wrote:
| An open platform to everyone...
|
| Apparently you missed a few decades of their development of
| the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactics.
|
| As well as their tendency to throw exorbitant licensing
| conditions on nearly everything they sold.
|
| As well as their repeated backdoor deals and maneuvers to
| cause vendor lock in across the entire PC market.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| They did not always have an open platform. Windows Phone was
| was a Apple style walled garden and Windows 8 did not allow
| applications outside the windows store to use the "modern"
| user interface.
|
| The only reason Microsoft is trending back to "open" is they
| failed when they imitated Apple.
| kmfrk wrote:
| They also want a piece of Discord, so that's most private group
| conversations along with the voice chats.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Nuance is text to speech in hospitals, government, call centers
| etc.. This is a market access play.
| bsean95531 wrote:
| Well my comment is I would like to have all information on my
| account send to my new address Sean Brennan 100 elk valley rd. #
| 15 Crescent city Ca.95531 U.S.A. cell 1+(707)218-4485 email/
| sbrennan716526@gmail.com/
| sjb95531@gmail.com/brennansean95531@gmail.com thank you Sean
| Joseph Brennan
| endisneigh wrote:
| One thing I considered doing long ago was creating middleware to
| use NaturallySpeaking via an API and noticed in their license
| agreement they have the following: A license for
| the Software Package does not allow Licensee to use the
| Software Package on a server.
|
| I'm curious how well this would hold up in a court. I only
| mention this because Nuance is a pretty litigious organization. I
| imagine they were bought pretty much for the patents.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| That seems quite common, I looked at a few PDF products a
| couple of years ago and they all wanted to license server
| installations individually whereas for workstations they are
| happy to offer a redistribution license.
| alberth wrote:
| This is a duplicate of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26774367
|
| Note: everyone is getting this acquisition wrong. It's not about
| Dragon and their Speech-to-Tex. This is all about owning an
| enterprise Communication Platform (e.g. Contact Center, etc).
|
| I'll repost my previous comment from the other HN thread below:
|
| ----
|
| Everyone is wanting to take on Twilio. Last September, Microsoft
| first announced their Communication Cloud.
|
| A huge focus at Twilio now is moving upstream to the Call Center,
| where Nuance is a significant player. So Microsoft picking up
| Nuance makes sense.
|
| It's clear Microsoft sees communication services as a strategic
| core part of their business.
|
| (Even at the consumer / gamer level with the rumored Discord
| acquisition talks)
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/22/microsoft-challenges-twili...
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Everyone is wanting to take on Twilio._
|
| Well then we can expect Microsoft to swoop in for Twilio any
| year now.
| alberth wrote:
| Given that TWLO market cap is $62B at the moment I wrote this
| comment, and Microsoft would have to pay a premium over that
| current valuation, I doubt they have the stomach to purchase
| someone for $70+ billion.
|
| And given that Jeff Lawson, is both he founder and CEO of
| TWLO - it's not entirely clear he would sell (unless the
| number is just so high, he has the fiduciary requirement that
| he has too - in which case I assume that would be north of
| $100B+)
| ignoramous wrote:
| I'd presume $2T in MarketCap could buy you multiple Twilios
| even at $100B.
|
| MSFT isn't shy from making large purchases unlike Amazon
| and Apple: They take such massive bets comparatively
| frequently.
| somethingAlex wrote:
| I'm not super deep into the world to NLP, but from what I have
| kept up with, it seems that the state-of-the-art is almost
| constantly open-sourced. I understand certain companies have
| personal relationships already built which may be what MS is
| after more so than the IP, but isn't there a "canonical" way of
| building a, for example, speech to text system for your phone?
|
| Is there really a lot of NLP IP hidden behind corporate walls at
| this point? I just assumed Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, etc
| were all using the same model architectures. Genuine question,
| can anyone shed some light?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I recently went through a ton of speech to text engines to test
| them. There are a lot of open source research projects as well
| as paid products, including amazon and google's paid products,
| which I assumed would be paying for the best of the best.
| Dragon (nuance's products) blew them out of the water in my
| experience. I was very surprised. Sentence error rate is still
| pretty shit across the board, so tiny improvements still make a
| massive difference in usability.
| raobit wrote:
| is Dragon really used in large scale enterprise, unlike
| siri,alexa for home automation, but i am hearing dragon let
| alone nuance famous for its AI product for the first time
| ionwake wrote:
| There is only one English "conversational" voice that I see (
| which seems to be the best).
|
| Is there a way to make the others "conversational" if not, is
| Zoe the best example?
|
| Did you find any competing product that came close?
|
| Thank you
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I'm referring to the speech to text product. What's the Zoe
| thing?
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| The hardest part of running a 10 mile marathon for most people
| is the last mile.
|
| Lots of amazing open source out there but the difference
| between 90% accuracy and 99.7% accuracy can be very difficult
| to obtain.
|
| Not to mention, quantified data sets, especially medical ones,
| can hold immense value.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Absolutely. Take a look at [this list][gov-uk-list] of free
| alternatives to Dragon. The only good free alternatives they
| list are the closed source ones built-in to Windows and Mac. Or
| have a look at [this announcement][nvda-announcement] touting
| open-source work to integrate closed-source voice recognition
| engines with an otherwise open-source piece of accessibility
| software.
|
| gov-uk-list:
| https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2018/09/27/assistive-techn...
|
| nvda-announcement: https://www.afb.org/aw/19/4/15104
| tapper wrote:
| Plenty of blind people would get behind this if it happened.
| https://t.co/vQIch9PLiW The skype thing was a clusterfuck. I
| loved skype casts and they fucked it all. Discorde is OK now, but
| dam does it make me feel old. I join a server and join a VC and
| here a bunch of 13 year olds. I have to leave because I am 38 and
| it's creepy to be talking to 13 14 yearolds on the internets at
| my age lol I made a server for tech nerds and people who like
| OpenWrt. https://discord.gg/KuNhWzvp5S.
| unfocused wrote:
| We only buy Nuance Dragon Naturally speaking for our lawyers.
| It's the best product out there. So maybe they want the Dragon
| technology.
| msie wrote:
| I'm shocked at the value of Pinterest (53 billon?).
| xyst wrote:
| In the next decade, there will only be 3-4 companies that own
| everything tech. We will only have the illusion of choice
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I remember using Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a windows98 machine
| - it was considered pretty good even back then..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| adler0901 wrote:
| Hopefully they'll fix Nuance's terrible website and support.
| glutamate wrote:
| Hopefully they will fix a couple of bugs in Dragon as well. I
| really would like them to have a release focused on bug fixes
| rather than greater accuracy
| pc86 wrote:
| Are the bugs ML-related or with the app more generally? I've
| never used Dragon but I'm pretty interested in the TTS space.
| glutamate wrote:
| Feels like the app, you often have to restart it, highly
| variable (by orders of magnitude) latency, sometimes won't
| start at all
| mkl wrote:
| More than a couple. It's the most unstable and unreliable
| program I use on a regular basis.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| If they got around to improving the python hooks too, that'd
| be pretty fantastic.
| [deleted]
| struct wrote:
| What does Microsoft get out of this? They already have TTS and
| deep learning transcription, what technical capabilities does
| Nuance have that they don't have already (or can't develop for
| substantially less than $20B?)
| seibelj wrote:
| Nuance owns a ton of patents and are extremely litigious.
| bitwize wrote:
| Probably a crapton of patents for voice recognition.
|
| Also, if you cannot operate a keyboard and must communicate by
| speech to operate a computer, it's pretty much Dragon
| NaturallySpeaking or GTFO. Integrating NaturallySpeaking tech
| into Windows would be a huge boon and further cement Windows as
| _the_ os to have if you have disabilities.
| lunixbochs wrote:
| I have users who have intentionally switched their speech
| engine from the latest version of Dragon to Talon, for both
| dictation and commands. Talon is cross platform and directly
| targets accessibility use cases (far more than just speech
| input).
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I switched from dragon to talon a while back... and then
| back to dragon :-\ Not to bash though. You've built a great
| product!
| lunixbochs wrote:
| I'm specifically talking about the new Conformer model,
| available in early access as of ten days ago. What you
| tried was likely the previous (circa 2018) model, which
| is much less accurate than Conformer.
|
| This is a demo of Conformer in Talon:
| https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Oh cool! Yeah I was using whatever the beta model was in
| December or so.
| [deleted]
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Nuance are absolutely miles ahead of the competition the second
| you're looking any other language than English.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| I don't think this is accurate (and I work in this field).
| eghad wrote:
| And what do you suggest is better? I've worked with nearly
| every tool (open source and closed) under the sun in
| medical, industrial, and personal settings and Dragon
| NaturallySpeaking/Professional was by far the best in terms
| of accuracy regardless of prosody, accent, background
| noise, technical terms used, etc.
|
| Personally I think they should've been acquired a decade
| ago.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| That answer depends on the language and on your use case.
| It seems like you're asking about desktop apps, but my
| parent was not talking in that context. Indeed there's
| not a lot of choice there because there's no money in it.
| eghad wrote:
| I'm even talking vs custom trained models with Kaldi (was
| working on a startup that was trying to create lessons
| for public speaking so we could grab enough data to
| tackle accent remediation/help those with aphasic speech
| disorders) and again just reiterating, the out of the box
| performance of Nuance's products are just better than
| anything else.
|
| Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition,
| but still not sure why people are downplaying how good
| they were at it.
|
| EDIT: or maybe it's just too prohibitively expensive for
| people outside of medical/legal fields to know about? And
| don't get me wrong, I love that things like Talon Voice
| are widely available for hands free coding, I just hope
| this means NaturallySpeaking will supplant Windows
| Dictation.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I've used it in medical in a multi-lingual setting and
| there it's basically the only game in town.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| If you have the data and a specific domain you can focus
| on then building a custom model [with kaldi] should
| always win. That's what I've done in the past (beating
| google, nuance etc.). You most likely didn't have the
| data and/or didn't know kaldi well.
|
| > Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition,
| but still not sure why people are downplaying how good
| they were at it.
|
| Because nuance wasn't very good.. at least in all the
| benchmarks I've seen. It's been a while since I compared
| numbers it's possible they've improved a lot. They're
| also known for kinda being dicks with the contracts they
| offer in B2B.
| makhmedov wrote:
| I think GitHub got better since the acquisition.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Got any specifics to back up that feeling?
| Scharkenberg wrote:
| Free private repos? Dark themes? The ability to use your
| Github account to log into other Microsoft places?
| globular-toast wrote:
| Why are you asking me?
| rvz wrote:
| Or much worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667101
| easton wrote:
| Isn't GitHub still in AWS though? Seems like they've just
| been pushing buggier software lately, perhaps that's an
| effect of being under Microsoft but it also might just be an
| effect of growing faster.
| m12k wrote:
| And LinkedIn is still terrible, but no more so than they were
| before the acquisition. Then again Skype just got worse and
| worse and Wunderlist just got absorbed by the borg cube. So a
| mixed record, but at least seems to have been getting better in
| more recent times.
| nicbou wrote:
| Wunderlist was killed off before Microsoft ToDo achieved
| feature parity. The web version wouldn't reliably let me log
| in. After a few months I switched to Todoist and never looked
| back.
| imdsm wrote:
| I must disagree. From a UX side alone, they've regressed, but
| then there have been more outages since the acquisition than
| before.
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| Jesus, can't companies just be the company they are y'know.
| drewda wrote:
| FWIW, I thought Google had pouched all of Nuance's key technical
| staff years ago.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I am surprised at the amount of mention Dragon is getting here.
| It has been a long, and at times tragic road. I worked at a
| company that used Dragon's technology in a voice control product
| for the original Macintosh. Mostly, I worked on a Windows version
| for a multimedia architecture Intel was developing, which
| entailed the acquisition of Spectron for a DSP OS.
|
| I got to meet a lot of the people involved at other companies in
| the project, including the Jim and Janet Baker, who founded
| Dragon, and many people at Intel up to and including Andy Grove.
| It was remarkable that he took interest in what was a relatively
| small project that was also distant from Intel's core products. I
| also met Jo Lernout, the L in L&H, which played a role in
| subsequent tragic events for the Bakers.
|
| All those people, and most of the technologies from those days,
| are gone now. Dragon ended up a part of Nuance, which itself had
| been called ScanSoft, and, before that, was a part of Xerox that,
| if I recall correctly, was acquired by Xerox from Ray Kurzweil.
|
| ScanSoft became a roll-up of a large number of speech technology
| companies. One of them was Nuance, and the roll-up was rebranded
| Nuance. Another acquisition was L&H, which had collapsed due to a
| financial scandal, which blew up after L&H had acquired Dragon.
| The Bakers got screwed and sued Goldman, who did the L&H deal.
| They lost.
|
| And that is your capsule history of Nuance. Sorry to give short
| shrift to the acquired companies I have no firsthand knowledge
| of.
|
| I believe the real story of Microsoft buying Nuance is that
| Nuance owns an enormous number of patents.
| bombcar wrote:
| Is it just me or have speech recognition platforms like Siri
| actually gone backwards in the last few years (roughly coinciding
| with the AI/ML craze)?
|
| It feels (anecdata) that Siri is doing a bit better on voice to
| tex when sending messages but much worse on simple commands like
| "turn off living room lights".
| tootie wrote:
| You have draw a distinction between voice recognition and
| digital assistants. Nuance is really just the former.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Siri is a train wreck. I have a $1200 phone where it takes more
| time to do "hey Siri FaceTime so-and-so" than to navigate. It
| just sits and spins.
| skrowl wrote:
| Siri is especially bad when compared to Google Assistant or
| Amazon Alexa, both of which are light years ahead.
|
| Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no
| matter how bad the software is.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| The thing that makes my iPhone worse is that it's hard to
| use Google Assistant (haven't tried Alexa) with my iPhone.
| I can't make Google Assistant the default voice interface.
| I can say "hey siri hey google", but honestly I'm not doing
| that. Google Assistant is decent, but it's not amazing. For
| any non-trivial task, I still have to do look things up
| manually.
|
| And while I'm ranting... the thing I hate most of about all
| of these services is they don't have a profanity mode. In
| the privacy of my own home I have AN EFFIN' HUGE POTTY
| MOUTH. I love to curse. I LOVE IT. The fact that I can't
| get one of these services to talk to me like a middle
| school student is extremely disappointing. I don't want to
| be politically correct when I'm talking to a virtual
| assistant in a private setting. I want to say "Hey
| goognizzle, are there any good mother f***ing movies
| opening near me this weekend?" and get Samuel L. Jackson
| style "Here's the mother f***ing movies opening on mother
| f***ing Friday at the 5 mother f***ing theaters closest to
| mother f***ing you."*
|
| Edit: TIL how to faux curse on HN. To type display
| "f***ing", I need to type out "f\\*\\*\\*ing".
| fastball wrote:
| I was actually under the impression that this is because
| Apple actually cares about privacy (unlike the other two)
| and so is not hoovering up everything you say to it and
| sending it to the cloud, but rather trying to do as much
| inference as possible on your device.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| _ding ding ding_
|
| Apple makes money selling devices to people.
|
| Google makes money selling people to advertisers.
|
| As a result Apple's maps and ML assistant aren't as good
| as Google's which harvests way more of people's data.
|
| I'm perfectly fine with this trade off. Lots of things
| iPhones do are even presented at as the data never
| leaving your phone at keynotes/press releases, and ads. A
| bullet point notably missing from Android phones. I
| deliberately use Apple's admittedly worse maps
| application whenever possible because I know it's not
| telling Big Brother about me when I know Google maps is.
| millsmob wrote:
| Edward Snowden revealed that Apple has been part of the
| PRISM electronic surveillance program since 2012.
|
| I would agree that Apple is significantly better on user
| privacy than Google or Facebook but that does not mean
| that the NSA isn't sucking up all your data from Apple
| Maps.
|
| Claiming that Apple isn't "telling Big Brother about me"
| is at best naive and at worst dangerous misinformation
| that could put activists and whistleblowers at risk of
| having their location data harvested by the US war
| machine.
| cletus wrote:
| Isn't it more likely that the quality of the voice
| assistant isn't that important to most buyers?
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Anecdata but I've never even bothered to try Siri on
| mine. I think you're on the money there.
| Jcowell wrote:
| In the flip side I use Siri everyday to turn on lights ,
| timers , custom iOS Shortcut commands , Intercom, play
| music, and to find my phone when I can't locate it I'm my
| house.
| molszanski wrote:
| I think so too. I am pretty sure that data will show it
| too. Five years ago the NextGen computing platform that
| will change the world where smart speakers. Now it is
| almost a niche product.
| darkwater wrote:
| (gonna be downvoted to death) Usually Apple die-hard
| buyers tend to minimize the importance of
| software/features that are not sported by an i-device or
| that doesn't work well there. When the 1st iPhone was
| released, the lack of native apps was a selling point "we
| use the web standards". When apps were introduced, they
| were again a selling point (and still are to the present
| day).
|
| The day Siri will work equal to/better than other
| competing systems, it will be used as a main reason for
| which you should buy an Apple device. The day before
| that, it will still be something that users actually
| don't want.
|
| EDIT: and to be a bit more clear that I'm serious with
| this, it actually makes sense. If a feature doesn't work
| well, you find ways around it. And if you are used to an
| ecosystem, maybe you don't even know how well another
| ecosystem works. And finally, if that ecosystem works for
| you well enough - or that device - you probably really
| don't care about that missing feature.
| temp667 wrote:
| I'm an apple buyer. Siri is terrible. Google assistant is
| pretty impressive. I would switch BUT - google's
| integration / support for things like work calendars is
| so terrible, and their response to consumer / user input
| so bad (ie, ignored despite #1 request for years and
| years) that I'm like most Apple users.
|
| Apple (and Amazon) get many things right, and actually
| seem to pay a tiny bit of attention to user needs. So
| it's really not worth playing with the google stuff
| because you end up in these weird nonsensical hells -
| everything is amazing, and then they just drop the ball
| in a key corner.
|
| For example, my google work calendar is EASY to integrate
| with Alexa along with my personal calendar. Fantastic,
| what's my schedule today works great. Google - falls flat
| on its' face for this, despite being a paying customer of
| their Gsuite. Their approach is just full of excuses
| here, and ignores that this desired interaction works
| well on their COMPETITORS devices but not theirs.
|
| Just one (of many) examples. They have some sort of
| eventually consistent backend more often for stuff so you
| also get weird states that you can't delete things,
| changes take longer to "flow through" etc.
| hnra wrote:
| What are you getting at? Assuming bad faith, or that
| Apple buyers are unable to evaluate purchase decisions
| objectively?
| darkwater wrote:
| No, I'm saying that Apple buyers are usually satisfied
| with their purchase for several reasons already. One
| feature not working as expected is just ignored/not
| needed.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I think that's an effect rather than the cause.
|
| My guess is that Apple management doesn't see voice
| assistants as the "next big thing" to differentiate
| themselves from the competition. I think VR/AR is where
| they are focusing and Siri is on life support.
| c0wb0yc0d3r wrote:
| Is it really reliance? To me it seems like they know their
| customers will just lay down and take it.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I write apps for Android and design devices that run on
| Android for a living. A friend once asked why I have an
| iPhone, and my response was pretty simple:
|
| "I'll switch to Android when I can rotate my screen
| animate the rotation instead of blanking out"
|
| They got it immediately.
|
| -
|
| For those not familiar with Android, your app's UI is
| completely destroyed on every single configuration
| change. Rotation. Plugging in a keyboard. Dark mode.
|
| Then the app has to redraw it's entire state from memory
| in the new orientation.
|
| To do that tiny little thing I described above you'd have
| to design your app to disable all built in configuration
| handling (so now it's on you to handle swapping out every
| resource when a language change happens, or dark mode is
| turned on) then hand animate every element to its new
| position on every screen. Needless to say, that's not
| done.
|
| It was probably very convenient when they were designing
| the G1 with it's 192MB of RAM, but to me it's a thing
| that encapsulates everything wrong with Android as a
| platform for me to use daily.
|
| I wonder what percentage of daily Android crashes in the
| world are a direct result of this tiny decision. Or god
| forbid, the amount of gnashing of teeth in how to write
| Android apps in a "clean" way that manages with this...
|
| (And yes, iOS has state restoration too, but it's
| strictly for returning from the background, so it's not
| nearly as intrusive)
| schmuelio wrote:
| I didn't remember how android handles screen rotations so
| I went and checked, I looked on both my phone and my
| tablet on a plethora of apps:
|
| - YouTube
|
| - GMail
|
| - FireFox
|
| - Plex
|
| - RIF (Reddit app)
|
| - Material (HackerNews app)
|
| - Main home screen
|
| - Sudoku game
|
| All of them animated screen rotation just fine, with no
| blank screen or glitching. Just a smooth animation of the
| app screen rotating from portrait to landscape (and
| back).
|
| It's possible that your assumptions are outdated and - by
| your own admission - should switch back to Android.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| You realize I work on Android devices all day long right?
|
| I have 5 of them sitting in this room!
|
| You might not notice, but I assure you, they clear the
| screen then fade back in. The exceptions are apps that
| have to handle configuration changes anyways like games
| or full screen video.
|
| It's not always a janky thing, phones have gotten fast
| enough that the screen redraw is easily hidden behind a
| half rotate followed by a fade in, but the point is that
| the hacks are even needed in the first place.
|
| Their approach to configuration changes just adds a
| massive footgun that trips up plenty of developers. The
| number of high profile apps with semi-permanent bugs like
| "I got scrolled back to the wrong part of the page when I
| rotated my phone!" insane.
|
| A future without that is only coming once we get a
| replacement for the current UI framework in the form of
| Flutter or Jetpack Compose (both of which handle
| configuration changes in new ways)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| With limited Android experience I can corroborate the
| screen rotation stupidity. The latest google wisdom is to
| use the Model View ViewModel pattern, which can help to
| work around this issue. If you are using a "view model"
| its a hack to largely avoid this screen rotation BS, but
| I don't expect many Android apps are implemented this
| way. Keeping up with google is like chasing your own
| tail.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I haven't written Android code in a few years, but IIRC,
| there's an attribute you can add to your manifest that
| lets you handle the rotation without getting your UI
| getting destroyed and recreated. This is relatively easy
| to do and seems to be commonly done, at least for bigger
| apps.
|
| Having worked in both Android and iOS development, I can
| assure you that they both have some ridiculous quirks and
| confusing APIs, but you eventually just learn to deal
| with them.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I already covered that:
|
| > To do that tiny little thing I described above you'd
| have to design your app to disable all built in
| configuration handling (so now it's on you to handle
| swapping out every resource when a language change
| happens, or dark mode is turned on) then hand animate
| every element to its new position on every screen.
|
| That's not done in "bigger apps", it's done in apps that
| have large areas not rendered with normal UI elements,
| like games, or camera apps
|
| I've done some iOS work too, and while iOS has its issues
| it "defaults" to making better apps, hands down.
|
| It's not unlike the user side of these platforms, iOS has
| a more opinionated "default" than Android
|
| Jetpack is trying to fix that but it's "not that much,
| extremely late"
|
| -
|
| But again, this is all missing the forest for the tree
| here, configuration changes are just a tiny part of the
| general "backend" choices that add up to a more powerful
| platform in developing for Android... but a less useable
| platform as a user
| dijit wrote:
| Statement about observed behaviour:
|
| > Siri is especially bad when compared to Google Assistant
| or Amazon Alexa, both of which are light years ahead.
|
| Followed by a statement about the entire ecosystem, of
| which only a tiny amount is Siri.
|
| > Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices
| no matter how bad the software is.
| TomVDB wrote:
| I'm always surprised when people shit on Siri. I use it all
| the time for simple commands, and it works pretty reliably.
|
| I've never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-
| phone voice assistant, so I'm not in a position to compare,
| but as long as it calls the people that I want, sets timers
| and alarms as needed, and routes me to my city of choice,
| why would I care?
| xnyan wrote:
| >I'm always surprised when people shit on Siri.
|
| >I've never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any
| non-phone voice assistant
|
| You're coming at it without experience. If you try the
| google and/or amazon version, you may still find Siri
| acceptable but I can absolutely guarantee you will not be
| surprised anymore when people call Siri shitty, because
| companied to amazon and google, it is.
| james_pm wrote:
| My favourite:
|
| "Hey Siri, make a Facetime call to Bob Smith." "Which Bob
| Smith would you like to call? bobsmith@icloud.com or
| bobsmith@me.com?
|
| How at this point does Siri not have even the most basic of
| logic to know that it's literally the same person. That's
| Apple's OWN service.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't know about Siri, but I do believe Google Home has
| gotten worse. My girlfriend and I mostly use it only for things
| like turning lights on and off, pausing/resuming the
| chromecast, setting timers, and asking for the weather.
|
| I've noticed it's been misunderstanding my girlfriend more and
| more over the past few months (she has a slight accent to her
| English, but nothing remotely difficult to understand), and
| lately it's started misunderstanding simple things that I say
| too. For example if I have Netflix paused and say "hey google,
| resume", 30% of the time it will give me search results for how
| to write a resume instead of unpausing Netflix. I've had the
| Google Home for a few years now, and that literally has never
| happened before now. To get it to work reliably, I have to
| instead say "resume playback" or "resume chromecast".
| racl101 wrote:
| Siri is useless for the most part. I would not depend on it for
| anything mission critical.
| Cullinet wrote:
| Lernaut & Haupsie went bankrupt in 99 holding the monopoly of
| every viable dictation platform and the aftermath of a enormous
| stock fraud that enabled management to hoover up everything at
| ludicrous valuations eg IBM Via Voice for something like $4BLN
| cash deal closed in unbelievable time, provided sufficient
| obfuscation and destruction to lay the sector to rest for two
| decades.
|
| Microsoft is making a intervention with things purchase the way
| I see it.
|
| What they have to do is provide a Linux version or at least
| O365 interop as good with Edge for Linux as Windows.
|
| Nuance support and products are hopeless - my subscription for
| $120/yr stopped working with ios14 and the app refused to send
| password reset emails and then we discovered that no online
| account management existed and cancelled instead of relying on
| 8/5/300 telephone queuing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernout_%26_Hauspie
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ViaVoice
| dr-detroit wrote:
| to be fair $4 Billion in 2021 is like $6000 in 1985
| everdrive wrote:
| This never seems to be a popular opinion on hn, but this is the
| ultimate Rube Goldberg machine: A complex ai built by a billion
| dollar company, an enormous amount of man hours, only so that
| switching a light switch because slower, and less
| deterministic. I'm certainly not suggesting that there are no
| valid uses for ML/AI, but digital assistants seem to be an
| enormous waste.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Speech recognition goes way beyond digital assistants. Plain
| old transcription is super useful, especially in terms of
| accessibility. I was voice coding for a while because of RSI
| and even as immature as the tech is, it saved my ass.
| dalbasal wrote:
| > this is the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine
|
| Salty, but I think I agree.
|
| It seems that with AI/ML, choosing/defining your problem well
| is hugely important. Text to speech, even computer generated
| natural language is a definite enough task that engineers
| (and machines) have the feedback to make progress.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Ignoring the fact that the research isn't only used one for
| one purpose, a proper assistant is hugely valuable to me.
|
| Simple things like:
|
| "Remind me to X tomorrow at 9am" "Add Y to the shopping list"
| "Remind me to do Z when I get home"
|
| This is the only way I do reminders now and it's great. It's
| especially useful while driving, or when I'm in bed nearly
| asleep and remember something, I can just tell Siri without
| having to get up and use my phone.
|
| And as far as smart home controls, being able to say "Siri,
| turn all the lights on" or "Siri, turn the heater on" without
| having to stop what I'm doing and walk around the house
| flicking switches is really nice.
|
| Assistants provide a very noticeable QoL improvement for me
| in many aspects. I think that's more than most other products
| on the market can say. And that's not even touching on the
| lives saved from not having to use your phone while driving.
| realo wrote:
| Yes but... Siri is (to me) not there yet. Promising but not
| there.
|
| Siri is unaware of so many things.
|
| A simple command that would actually be useful (but fails
| totally):
|
| << Siri, remind me to buy milk the next time I go get
| groceries. >>
|
| And even then... I should not have to mention the part
| about << groceries >>. The request should be perfectly
| understood with a full stop after the word << milk >> and a
| reminder should pop up automatically whenever I am in a
| grocery (any grocery).
|
| An even better Siri would also be able to a categorize
| things properly. For example, if later in the day I say <<
| Siri, I will need chicken, butter, salt and cardamom for my
| next recipe >>, Siri should automatically add those to the
| << milk >> next time I go to the grocery.
| everdrive wrote:
| I'm still not very impressed by this, as it can be totally
| accomplished by a pad of paper and a pen.
|
| I'm believe the most valid use of AI/ML is to perform tasks
| that people either cannot currently do, or cannot easily
| do. For example, ai-based up-scaling of old video game pre-
| renders. It's not really feasible for a person to do this
| well, unless you simply rebuild everything with a team of
| artists. And you could argue that up-scaling images for a
| video game is trivial, since all video games are trivial.
| But, the point is that the task at hand requires the help
| of a computer, whereas a to-do list, or using a light
| switch does not.
| what_ever wrote:
| Let's see the situations when you are setting those
| reminders -
|
| 1. In bed, all ready to fall asleep, you get up to get
| your notebook from your desk to add the reminder to your
| notebook.
|
| 2. Cooking with hands all messy, you wash your hands, dry
| them, go to your desk to add the reminder to your
| notebook.
|
| 3. Driving at 40mph, so you pull over in a parking lot,
| take out your notebook from your bag and add the
| reminder.
|
| Yeah, I will take telling Google assistant to do this
| instead.
| Balgair wrote:
| I gotta ask, can one not just use their memory and
| remember to write those things down in a few minutes/the
| morning? I know that kinda defeats the purpose of a
| notebook. But, like, remembering to write down to get
| more garlic should not be difficult in any way. Also, if
| one is so perturbed at forgetting things then some other
| questions and areas need to be explored. If one is having
| difficulty remembering things this much, I fear that
| there are much deeper issues and possibly some quite
| serious health problems at play.
| everdrive wrote:
| 1. There's nothing wrong with keeping that same notebook
| by your bed. Also, you might wake your spouse up by
| talking to Google.
|
| 2. Don't get so messy when cooking, also it hardly
| matters if your temporary notebook gets a bit dirty.
|
| 3. Don't multitask when driving. Taking your eyes off the
| road is the main concern, but testing has shown driver's
| voice control systems to be distracting to a significant
| degree. And, voice assistants are at least somewhat
| similar.
| saemei wrote:
| > tasks that people either cannot currently do, or cannot
| easily do.
|
| A todo entry or flipping lights via assistants also
| qualify as such tasks, if we broaden the definition of
| "easy". The flow from having the thought of an idea or a
| song to making a note or playing the song by just
| speaking out loud is just so _convenient_ , without
| having to context switch from whatever one is doing.
| Controlling a set of IoT devices with custom commands is
| another good usecase.
|
| Of course, not everyone has a workflow where a digital
| assistant fits well _today_. However, I expect that their
| usefulness will increase exponentially with time. We 're
| surely heading to the sci-fi future where each house will
| have a personalized digital guardian responding to the
| wishes of the family, Jarvis style, no?
| nsriv wrote:
| I'm a fan of Google Assistant's usefulness and I generally
| agree with this. The Assistant craze seems more justified
| when you consider that companies like Google and Amazon are
| using it as a way to build datasets. It's a strategic reserve
| of data to build other things from (i.e. Google Duplex) and
| it doesn't matter at their scale if there isn't a vision yet,
| if a competitor is stockpiling transcribable voice data, they
| need to keep up.
| atat7024 wrote:
| > The Assistant craze seems more justified when you
| consider that companies like Google and Amazon are using it
| as a way to build datasets.
|
| Basically every new goddamn trend that is _allowed_ to
| occur is about how datasets can be compiled from such
| marketed options.
|
| That's why we don't have first-class convergence devices
| yet. It'd likely blend our home and mobile usage profiles
| too much.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I've been having the same feeling with Google Assistant on
| Android Auto.
|
| It feels like it does better in edge cases at the expense of
| the main cases.
| nojito wrote:
| Because that's not what she was designed for.
|
| Siri is way more than a pure voice "assistant".
| klausjensen wrote:
| ...so he is using it wrong?
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Holding it wrong.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Is it just me or have speech recognition platforms like Siri
| actually gone backwards in the last few years..._
|
| I've used both Siri and Alexa daily for many years, and used to
| rag on Siri a _lot_. In my experience Siri has caught up to
| Alexa on most fronts, and I find them more or less
| interchangeable my common use cases (home automation, timers
| /alarms, music, news/weather summaries, etc.).
|
| That's not saying much since the Alexa bar is quite low. But
| like many Apple products, I'd characterize Siri's improvements
| as "slow and steady" for almost a decade now.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| Siri is terrible, but have you tried Google Assistant? I find
| it very accurate at recognizing my speech and very fast. It
| feels like a vastly superior product and I definitely find
| myself using it on my Google devices.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, came in to say this. Google Assistant has
| _consistently_ gotten better year after year. I 'm surprised
| it understands me sometimes.
| suddenexample wrote:
| Google Assistant is pretty good. But Google's on-device voice
| transcription in GBoard (unsure if it's a Pixel exclusive) is
| borderline magical. The delay between speaking a word and
| having it appear on the screen is shockingly short.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| Oh yeah, the transcription is super good. I'm so sad it is
| crippled on iOS by requiring some weird app switching to
| work. Except for that part, it is super faster there too.
| technofiend wrote:
| Google's appliance recently decided to stream Dark Piano on The
| Choice on Tune In when I say "OK Google, stream NPR.". Those
| things are so far apart I assume someone took a bribe to
| redirect customers for certain keywords. Lol. (Not really but
| it was my first thought.)
|
| Google's online advice is whenever the assistant fails to work
| just retrain the device. I remain skeptical that's the issue
| because it's not like my way of speaking has changed. Instead I
| have just switched to a new way to request what I need since
| reporting the issue via Google's vaunted customer service
| process seems likely to fail.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Siri is brain-damaged. I am constantly disappointed with how
| stupid she is compared to Alexa and the gap is widening. I try
| to keep things as simple as possible with her because she
| always disappoints me. I wish Apple would open up a tiny bit of
| those 200 billion in cash reserves on improving Siri.
| geodel wrote:
| I mean I can understand how stupid siri is. I find it so
| irritating that I always keep it disabled. But the point that
| anything Apple doing bad is for the lack of spending is
| hilarious.
|
| In fact I'd say Apple is just keeping spending money instead
| of shutting it down. When IBM Watson AI sank like turd in
| market it cut funding and let most of team go. I think Apple
| doing same might be more sensible.
| defaultname wrote:
| I think Siri is intended to be more goal oriented. I use it
| extensively, with very little complaint, daily-
|
| -set alarm -next song -set timer -set reminder (e.g. "Siri
| set reminder 6pm close garage door") -send message to
| <person>
|
| These comprise 99% of what I would want it to do, and it
| does it marvelously.
| iamatworknow wrote:
| Same here. I replaced the few Alexa devices in my house
| with Homepods over the last year and have notice no
| difference in how well they work because I don't use them
| for anything particularly complicated, and I don't _want_
| to use them for any more than that. The only thing Siri
| seems to mess up for my usage is not interpreting things
| I put on my shopping list correctly, but usually in a way
| that's still recognizable (like "milk this'll").
| Lewton wrote:
| > I find it so irritating that I always keep it disabled.
|
| Ah, if there only was a way to disable it fully. Even when
| I disable Siri, it still randomly decides to call people
| when I boil a pot of rice
| DrBazza wrote:
| You clearly haven't had the pleasure of trying to use voice
| control in a Mercedes-Benz. It makes Siri and Cortana seem
| telepathic by comparison.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Have you tried speaking to it in German?
|
| (joking aside, is that voice control developed in the US or
| in Germany?)
| throwaway4good wrote:
| German always works! (For cats at least.)
|
| Seriously - my guess is that they try to perform the
| speech recognition client side (on the local hardware)
| and are less agressive on how they collect data for model
| training.
|
| Unlike Google or some company in China which make thin
| clients that send everything to a central server where it
| is much easier to recognize, correct and train.
| gambiting wrote:
| Got a 2020 volvo. The voice controls are insanely bad. I
| can 100% reproduce a situation where saying "hey volvo,
| switch off the seat heating" turns it up to max.
| agotterer wrote:
| Same with the Audi. I don't understand why all the car
| companies aren't licensing the assistant technology from
| the big tech companies and using it as the default.
|
| I get Siri via car play, but even car play is sandboxed
| because it can't control things like the radio or
| temperature.
| stadium wrote:
| The procurement decisions for the infotainment system are
| made around 5 years in advance of the vehicle release.
| The tech is obsolete before the car leaves the
| dealership.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Android Auto at least works, and that in turn has voice
| recognition that works. It's completely "meta" that I
| have to use voice recognition on my phone to call a
| number that triggers bluetooth that activates the hands-
| free and speaker in the car.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I would argue that in-car infotainment systems should be
| nothing but a dumb terminal into your phone. We already
| have devices with voice recognition, navigation,
| multimedia, etc. Why don't we have a way to just use
| that?
| DrBazza wrote:
| I completely agree. I wouldn't be surprised if this is
| what happens. It's partly there already.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| I've been looking for a single DIN car audio device that
| is nothing more than an amplifier with Bluetooth, but
| such a thing does not exist. My phone already does
| Music/Radio/Maps - all I need is the car head unit to
| connect to it and playback the audio through the car
| speakers. I've even started thinking about some sort of
| home built version using parts from a cheap Bluetooth
| speaker system (minus the actual speakers).
| bentcorner wrote:
| There's plenty of old-school single DIN devices that have
| bluetooth in them. You'll usually find they have a radio
| and other junk (e.g. mp3 over usb) but most are fairly
| simple and it shouldn't be hard to find one that stays in
| bluetooth mode all the time.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Yes, but they all look awful! XD
| rkalla wrote:
| For the reason it took BMW so long to say yes to Android
| Auto - Amazon/Google will happily license the tech but
| want ALL the customer data off the car.
| Alex5899 wrote:
| If manufacturers use big tech voice assistance, it'd mean
| extra subscription for the car owners...really sick and
| tired of these "subscription" thingy. Microsoft Office
| used to offer one-time purchase, now it isn't an option.
| Are we going to have everything subscription eventually?
| gambiting wrote:
| Because even the "big" tech from "big" companies is still
| shit. Have a 2020 LG TV with Google assistant built in,
| and it's a piece of hot garbage.
|
| Example: I frequently switch between display profiles to
| suit what I need. Saying
|
| "switch to cinema display mode" - works fine.
|
| Saying:
|
| "switch to user display mode" - 100% of the time results
| in the TV replying "which user would you like to
| select?".
|
| Like...it's not my fault that the dumb TV has the custom
| profile named "User".
|
| Google probably spent billions on voice recognition, but
| it's all worthless, because someone without an ounce of
| imagination just coded it to react to the words "change"
| and "user" as the user profile selector, the rest of the
| sentence be damned.
|
| But back to cars - Google Assistant in Android Auto is
| equally shit. Try saying "hey google, open spotify", then
| "hey google, play music". 100% of the time, it switches
| from Spotify to Google Music. It's insane.
| bombcar wrote:
| The move to companies naming everything "Brand Name
| Generic Name" coincided with the move to voice assistants
| in the worst possible way. "iTunes" is unique but "Apple
| Music" is just two nouns - and we see this across so many
| properties.
| hobonumber1 wrote:
| Is that the voice control in the MBUX, or in older
| Mercedes?
| DrBazza wrote:
| In every MB I've been in, in the last decade, the voice
| recognition could be described as "entertaining".
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Same in my Toyota. It has explicit instructions which,
| despite a few honest efforts, I can't seem to follow well
| enough for the assistant to work with any reliability. It's
| also painfully slow as it fails to understand, making the
| tumble into the pit of infotainment despair seem to happen
| in slow motion. Not sure how it ever hit the market.
| [deleted]
| dominotw wrote:
| >she always disappoints me
|
| siri doesnt default to female voice anymore.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Doesn't default to male voice either, you will have to
| choose. I bet most people keep it what it always was
| (female in the US, some countries like UK were male
| voices).
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Oh come on! That was announced like 2 weeks ago!
| eCa wrote:
| Siri is a female name[1] so it makes sense to use 'she'
| when humanizing her.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(given_name)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This is not much to do with the speech recognition itself, but
| with the AI behind interpreting the commands.
|
| I'm indeed also a bit surprised that this hasn't progressed.
| It's still not possible to say things like "Turn on my living
| room lights and the hallway as well". It still feels very
| scripted where you have to say things exactly the right way and
| in bite-sized chunks to make it work. The same with Alexa by
| the way.
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| I just tried that command with Google Assistant and it
| worked.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's insanely more frustrating because there is _no standard
| list of commands_ - I 'm perfectly fine saying things in the
| way the computer needs (what is a command line after all) but
| there's no reference listing what it is expecting so you just
| have to do trial and error to find out what works.
| armagon wrote:
| And it is different for every skill (for Alexa, anyway).
|
| And a command that worked yesterday may not work today.
| (Gah!)
| Jcowell wrote:
| I would say it has progressed compared to 10 years ago.
| Speech technology in general to. I remember when YouTube auto
| captions didn't even hit close to what was being said we now
| they're way more usable.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Its been weirdly variable- my Apple Watch and the HomePod mini
| seem much more accurate than my iPhone.
| aquadrop wrote:
| Youtube since recently (or I just noticed it) has very good
| auto-CC, their voice recognition even works in noisier videos.
| geewee wrote:
| After having tried Microsoft's automatic captioning on Microsoft
| Stream which is akin in accuracy to monkeys typing something
| random on a typewriter, I think this seems like a good choice.
| nradov wrote:
| Live captioning in Microsoft Teams isn't terrible.
| lhousa wrote:
| Off topic but axios looks neat and tidy! I could read news every
| day. Is there anything similar that covers worldwide news?
| yalogin wrote:
| I am confused how speech recognition tech is worth 20 billion.
| It's not even on the most popular platforms like iPhone, android
| or the desktops even. Can someone shed some light on this?
| ghc wrote:
| > September 15, 2005 -- ScanSoft acquired and merged with
| Nuance Communications, of Menlo Park, California, for $221
| million.
|
| > October 18, 2005 -- the company changed its name to Nuance
| Communications, Inc.
|
| So Nuance was worth ~$220MM at the time of acquisition. I'm
| sure it's worth a lot more now but ScanSoft acquired like 50
| other companies too, including old voice recording giant
| Dictaphone.
| ignoramous wrote:
| "Enterprise sales" and "health care":
| https://investors.nuance.com/download/NUAN+%28Nuance+Communi...
| f0rklift wrote:
| Great buy for MSFT. Voice is the future of healthcare and they
| just bought the best player in the game.
| jonplackett wrote:
| > The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company, for example,
| powered the speech recognition engine behind Apple's voice
| assistant, Siri.
|
| That is the last speech recognition engine I would ever want to
| buy.
| rvz wrote:
| Now Nuance.
|
| It seems Microsoft is still actively continuing to buy more
| companies and it seems Discord is still on the menu.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| And Ubuntu! Totally expecting that in the news at this point.
| CivBase wrote:
| I was about to say RHEL would be more in their wheelhouse,
| but then I remembered that ship has already sailed.
| traveler01 wrote:
| Really hope not, Ubuntu is like a beacon in the Linux world,
| no matter if you like it or not. Microsoft purchasing Ubuntu
| would mean the end of Linux desktop...
| traveler01 wrote:
| It's actually kinda scary to see Microsoft stretching its
| tentacles like this. Only this year they bought Bethesda,
| Nuance and there are rumours about them buying Discord and
| other gaming studios.
|
| Microsoft's influence is growing deeply...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| They're looking at ~$50B / yr in profit, only about ~$17B
| that's paid out in dividends. What else are they going to do
| with $33B every year?
| tupac_speedrap wrote:
| Where is the antitrust lawsuit?
|
| Microsoft got done for this before (bundling Internet
| Explorer with Windows) and if you look at where they are now
| buying out businesses and using dark patterns in Windows 10
| to make people use Edge as well as implying it is a
| fundamental part of the OS they are way beyond was acceptable
| years ago.
| traveler01 wrote:
| You're right.
|
| They've been abusing their position and power for years now
| and the Edge situation with Windows 10 is getting much
| worse after the Chromium update. They force you to use the
| said browser with some features, like when you use the
| search function it automatically opens Edge browser, even
| if you have another browser set as default. What's next?
| Removing the option to set defaults for browsers?
|
| It's one of the reasons I'm willing to buy a MacBook
| next...
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| What does an all cash deal of $20bn look like? I'm assuming it's
| really just an ACH transaction or something? There's not a convoy
| of armored cars with silver briefcases or anything... Is there?
| aembleton wrote:
| It means that Microsoft are giving money in exchange for shares
| of Nuance instead of giving Microsoft Stock in exchange for
| Nuance Stock.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| So unfair that you are forced with your arms twisted behind your
| back to spend that much money on such a terrible device! What a
| gyp!
| pinko wrote:
| You may not realize, but "gyp" is a bigoted ethnic slur. Please
| don't use it here or anywhere.
| ArcturianDeath wrote:
| So you flagged their comment for something you aint and that
| wasnt directed at anyone? How infantile. Now, no one knows
| what they said.
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| Yeah this is good to call out. A couple years ago I used it
| and got dogpiled for racism and I had to say "ok, I will stop
| using it, but who am I being racist against?" And I got
| educated, which was good, because I did not know it is a slur
| against Roma.
|
| A lot of people use it without knowledge of context, so
| adding the context is important.
| someperson wrote:
| Several years ago I used a Nuance product named Dragon
| NaturallySpeaking that had speech-to-text capability and adds
| verbal accessibility features on Windows platforms (eg, say "Open
| Word", speak your document aloud, then "Close Word")
|
| I had no idea they had enough sales to justify a $20 billion
| valuation. Though to be fair, Microsoft tends to acquire
| companies at high price tags (eg, Skype, LinkedIn, Minecraft)
| compared to eg, Apple's acquisition strategy of smaller
| technology focused companies (other than Beats headphones) like
| P.A. Semi and PrimeSense.
|
| EDIT: Other comments say Nuance's patent portfolio may greatly
| contribute to its valuation.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Nuance OEMs and sells backend systems for IVRs and all sorts of
| products. You probably interact with their stuff routinely and
| not even know it.
|
| They also bought up a lot of small companies and products from
| bigger companies and own a lot of patents.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Yeah, but they've got their tentacles into a lot of complicated
| sticky markets.
|
| For example, they've done all the work to get that same
| software certified healthcare grade and convinced lots of
| hospitals to adopt it for their doctors. They can sell that for
| a lot more than they sell the essentially same software to you.
|
| If you go to a corporate website and see an "Industries"
| section with Healthcare, Telecommunications, Finance,
| Government, and more you know they're good at this sort of
| rent-seeking.
| ghc wrote:
| Keep in mind that the company named Nuance is a big, 30 year
| old public company with a lot of products, which acquired
| Nuance and changed its name in 2005. According to Wikipedia
| they did $2 Billion USD in revenue in 2016 and had $5.7 Billion
| in assets.
| udev wrote:
| Also wasn't Siri based on Nuance technology?
|
| If so imagine them sales...
| raobit wrote:
| Can you link some source of it, can't find it
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Bear in mind, Nuance is often the voice technology behind other
| companies' speech-based products too. Nuance technology
| originally powered Siri, for example.
| qntmfred wrote:
| Nuance itself was actually spun out of an organization called
| SRI (note the resemblance to the name Siri)
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is incorrect. Nuance was a company that originated
| decades ago, SRI did build Siri, using Nuance's speech
| technology, but Nuance itself did not spin out of SRI.
| qntmfred wrote:
| https://www.sri.com/hoi/natural-language-speech-
| recognition/
|
| > SRI spun off market leader Nuance Communications to
| commercialize the technology
|
| https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-
| bri...
| microtherion wrote:
| That's true, but technically, the company that is named
| "Nuance" today was originally named "ScanSoft". They
| bought the original Nuance and assumed its name.
|
| It's a bit like Symantec, which bought everything,
| including its name.
| raobit wrote:
| Is Nuance into healthcare or speech/voice recognition? Didn't
| knew about the Siri thing though
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Yes. My wife uses Dragon for her writing her clinical
| notes. It's apparently pretty popular.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Nuance is a speech recognition company, but due to their
| on-premise software which has a lot of integration options
| and having custom distributions for medical and legal
| jargon, they tend to be a go-to choice for adding voice to
| professional highly-regulated industry platforms.
| raobit wrote:
| Can you link some source of nuance powering siri, i think SRI
| was where it was built
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| SRI built Siri using Nuance for the speech components, and
| Nuance continued to be used for Siri under Apple:
| https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/05/apple-siri-nuance/
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/30/nuance-
| confirms-i...
| newsclues wrote:
| I think the way carmakers are going the auto industry could
| justify most of the valuation.
| yelloo wrote:
| a little over a decade ago i contracted for nuance working on a
| speech-to-text project for cell phone voicemail, either att or
| verizon. the job was literally listening to actual customers'
| voicemails and transcribing them (or correcting auto-
| transcriptions) into the system. literally 6 to 8 hour shifts of
| pure mind numbing work. we were told nothing about the tech
| behind it but I wonder if any of that work compounded into some
| of their in-use tech today, or if it was all just throw away.
|
| pointless story aside, their enterprise valuation at the time was
| a little under 20% of what it is today, and the company remained
| mostly the same until 2 years ago. wonder what the catalyst was
| for their 5x valuation growth?
| josefresco wrote:
| In other news, how did Pinterest go from $11B to $53 billion in
| roughly the last year? COVID-19 bump or something else?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| They really turned on monetization and the entire market was
| discounted 33% last year.
|
| Pinterest went from ~$250m revenue / quarter to tripling that
| in just 2 quarters. That's huge and unexpected that revenue
| would climb that high.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is really, really unfortunate. One of the last on-device
| speech companies is being bought out and moved into Microsoft's
| cloud division. Expect nobody to be willing to sell you speech
| recognition without a cloud subscription now.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I agree. Even though acquiring is a good strategy for Microsoft
| to an extent, it is also a problem to see continued
| consolidation. How can anyone hope to compete against these
| giants in the same product segments? They have unlimited cheap
| capital and the ability to integrate an acquired product into
| the rest of their products. Then there's the issue of
| intellectual property and continued building of patent war
| chests. If one of these companies copies your innovative
| feature, you will have no recourse to sue them because they'll
| be sitting on a mountain of random mundane patents. The fact
| that these companies can make $20B acquisitions itself feels
| broken from a healthy market perspective.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| C+AI makes products that can work offline though (yes it has
| the words Azure and cloud, no they aren't required):
|
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/with-azure-percept-microsoft-...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The blog claims that it is so devices can continue to work
| when it's offline, not that it didn't use Azure when it was
| online, and also that the devices are intended to by deployed
| via Azure IoT Hub.
|
| Which is to say, the blog doesn't make it sound like I can
| use this without an Azure subscription, even if it works
| offline sometimes. Whereas the Microsoft Speech SDK, I could
| just include the DLL files and run with it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| On the flip side, the open source tech has gotten good enough
| that you can basically roll your own now.
| athenot wrote:
| Nuance has grown through acquisitions. They basically bought up
| technologies and slapped a common name on them. But each one
| retained its one oddities. So you configure one product with
| INI-style files, another one with XML files, a module within
| that one is configured with text files using configuration
| codes... it's a royal pain in the behind.
|
| Hopefully Microsoft will eventually unify these apis and
| configurations into something coherent.
| brainzap wrote:
| like they did with Azure? xD
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Not quite "on device" but Microsoft Azure provides Speech
| Cognitive Services as containers that you can run in your local
| environment:
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/sp...
|
| I believe Google Cloud Platform has something similar available
| (not sure about AWS).
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I use desktop PCs as my "device", so hardware power isn't
| really an issue here, but the fact that it's still usage
| priced would be the big issue.
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| plenty open-source options are available. Checkout
| https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo
| yosito wrote:
| Are you saying this discussion calls for some nuance?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You don't know their roadmap or plans for Nuance yet you
| attribute motive.
| [deleted]
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Microsoft's focus here is pretty well known: They've retired
| the Windows Speech SDK almost entirely in favor of Azure
| services, which is where the Microsoft Speech team has moved
| to, and the announcement explicitly stated Microsoft is
| bringing this under their "Intelligent Cloud" segment.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They claimed two things. That this would be exclusively
| cloud and that nobody will sell you speech recognition
| without a subscription. I doubt this is all.
| lunixbochs wrote:
| I'm in the on-device space, here's a recent demo of my engine
| for a niche use case (it also does large vocabulary dictation
| very well):
| https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I'll take a look! I am still looking for the right speech
| recognition setup for my needs. I wrote an app that largely
| expects text input of the spoken command, and I'd ideally
| like to have hotword detection + speech recognition that can
| be set up to output the detected command to my own software.
| lunixbochs wrote:
| What are you building?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I have been hacking on a home automation controller (that
| isn't particularly well written, to be honest) for a
| number of years, and voice is one area I do not want to
| have to figure out how to write myself. I am a bit
| concerned about having to heavily integrate with a model
| that requires I explicitly build sentence patterns in
| their software, because it'd lock me in pretty heavily to
| that solution.
|
| (My wife has been using Dragon for dictation heavily
| lately, so that's a use-case that is intriguing to me as
| well, especially if today's announcement means the death
| of the Dragon product line in the near future.)
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Am I the only doc who despises Nuance? Dragon is definitely
| Microsoft-style software: lots of exposed features with defaults
| randomly set to "what no one would want, ever". Nevermind the
| core algorithm never really seemed to work well for me.
| Kye wrote:
| People tell me I'm blunt sometimes but have you tried to price
| nuance lately? Doesn't come cheap.
| idclip wrote:
| Rip.
| [deleted]
| achow wrote:
| This is incredible for a company like Nuance.
|
| At the time of acquisition:
|
| Nuance: $20B, employee strength 6000. 3M/employee
|
| LinkedIn: 26B, employee strength ~12000. 2M/employee
|
| LinkedIn was much more larger, more 'visible' and perhaps better
| talent attractor than Nuance at the time of acquisition.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Oh this is big, Nuance is not very well known to the public but
| they are indeed very big in speech recognition. We used their
| solution with automated support systems.
| raobit wrote:
| True, i came to know people appreciating it here that it is
| better than siri,alexa in terms of speech recognition, is it
| really that good. Support system you mean IVR?
| qwertox wrote:
| I knew Nuance sounded very familiar, but when I googled it, the
| news were about an AI company, which confused me.
|
| DragonDictate / Dragon NaturallySpeaking, that's why it sounded
| so familiar.
| mwambua wrote:
| $NUAN's spike from $45 on Friday makes sense. However, I'm having
| trouble figuring out why they currently trade at ~$53 given that
| the market knows that Microsoft will pay $56 for each share.
| (https://news.microsoft.com/2021/04/12/microsoft-accelerates-...)
|
| Any ideas on why that is?
| johncoogan wrote:
| Pricing in a small chance that the acquisition won't go through
| (maybe due to FTC clearance, but could be other due diligence
| related items).
| 16bytes wrote:
| For those confused, this acquisition is due in large part by
| Nuance's dominance in healthcare related products. From Nuance's
| last earnings release[1]:
|
| "We are very pleased with the strong start to the fiscal year, as
| we delivered revenue and EPS above our guidance range
| expectations," said Mark Benjamin, Chief Executive Officer at
| Nuance. "We continued to advance our strategic initiatives,
| accelerating our cloud transition across our core platforms in
| Healthcare and focusing on our AI-first approach in Enterprise.
| In Healthcare, we saw solid performance in our cloud-based
| offerings, growing cloud revenue 28% year-over-year. In
| particular, we benefited from strong performance in Dragon
| Medical & DAX Cloud revenue, which grew 22% year-over-year driven
| by the ongoing transition of our installed base to Dragon Medical
| One, as well as traction in international, ambulatory and
| community hospital markets. Enterprise delivered another record
| revenue quarter, up slightly from its previous record in Q1'20,
| driven by particularly strong demand for our Security &
| Biometrics solutions."
|
| Nuance has deep relationships built with nearly every health
| system in the US and beyond. This fits quite well with
| Microsoft's corporate focus. Yes, Nuance also has a lot of IP,
| but I wouldn't expect any consumer facing changes (e.g. Cortana)
| in the near term.
|
| [1]
| https://investors.nuance.com/download/EX%2099.1%20Press%20Re...
| hbosch wrote:
| I worked years ago at a major cell phone mfg company, and we
| were comparing vendors (circa 2013-2014) for the voice
| recognition/transcription software. I remember two of the
| leading options were SoundHound (dba then as "Hound", which has
| since gone to market as a voice solution[0]) and Nuance which
| was a company not many of us had ever heard of.
|
| At the time, Hound actually was very very good at language
| recognition and impressed everyone quite a bit. Compared to
| Nuance, the experience of conversing with Hound was better as I
| remember. However, Nuance had the edge in language support...
| while Hound was great for Western dialects of English, and some
| others, Nuance supported Mandarin. End of the day it was no
| contest which product we had to go with.
|
| I'm not surprised that Nuance had continued to be an industry
| leader all these years.
|
| ...
|
| 0. https://www.soundhound.com/hound
| samstave wrote:
| And now you know why there will never ever ever be "free
| healthcare for all" in the US because this is how profitable
| sickness is. Plandemic.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>"free healthcare for all"
|
| There never has been and will never be 'free healthcare for
| all' - its not free, it's only free for some people if some
| other people pay for it.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| You pay with your taxes. Is that this hard to understand?
|
| In France when my boss give me 1 euros, he has to give 0.33
| cents to a found that goes toward my healthcare. Then most
| things are << free >>. From regular doc appointments to
| oncologists.
|
| Here I pay 500$/month, and then some co-pay and then some
| more.
|
| It's not that different.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I've never seen anyone argue that. Well, until now anyway.
| rand49an wrote:
| America spends the highest amount per capita & the most in
| total terms by a large margin and they aren't able to cover
| 100% of their citizens.
|
| Nobody thinks that healthcare is magically free in the rest
| of the world, but at least in countries with socialised
| medicine people pay into a system that covers everyone in
| society.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I'm curious who you think is actually out there laboring
| under the assumption that healthcare becomes absolutely,
| and literally, free?
| inopinatus wrote:
| Given the venue of these remarks, and the otherwise
| reductio ad absurdum of the alternatives, we can surmise
| this is referring to free as in speech, not free as in
| beer, and they mean sante libre, to distinguish it from
| proprietary licensed healthcare.
| [deleted]
| fakedang wrote:
| A lot of Europeans in the lower taxpaying tiers who love
| to shit on Americans (especially when the American
| healthcare system has been getting so much coverage the
| past decade).
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| Some examples would be useful. Yes, many that don't pay
| tax benefit from the government, and yes, you can view
| that as a working class paying for the unemployed.
|
| Imagine, if you will, a 50-year-old woman on the dole
| (she's paid a monthly sum by the government). In Germany,
| for instance, this is only paid if she can prove that she
| applied, and continues to apply for work/seek employment.
|
| It's a bit of a mad circle - she doesn't want work,
| because she has a comfortable, if meagre life. Of course
| she dutifully applies for employment every month, and
| occasionally lands an interview.
|
| She's been out of work for so long though, that's she's
| no longer employable. She's too old for manual labour,
| cannot type, doesn't do Internet. And so no one will have
| her.
|
| It's not ideal for someone expecting to get out what they
| put into the system, but it's a social safety net that's
| better than forcing people out onto the street. Will all
| the problems that brings.
|
| And yes, the 50-year-old gets "free" healthcare. Which I
| contribute to, from my hard work. And I think this system
| among the best on the planet.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _And yes, the 50-year-old gets "free" healthcare. Which
| I contribute to, from my hard work. And I think this
| system among the best on the planet._
|
| I wish more people had that attitude.
|
| Instead, in the US, we have people actively making their
| own lives worse because they don't want to give others
| things they don't believe they "deserve".
|
| If taking more out of my paycheck would get all the
| homeless people off the streets, I would happily do that.
| I personally believe that everyone has a right to
| housing, but even if I didn't care about people, I'd be
| ok with it because getting homeless people off the
| streets makes my life better too.
|
| Ensuring that people aren't insecure about housing and
| food translates to lower crime rates and safer
| neighborhoods.
|
| It makes me genuinely angry that anti-welfare people
| don't get this, and actively lobby against their own
| interest. I'm sure there are some people who just believe
| that welfare programs don't work, and are against them on
| those grounds, but most of the rhetoric I hear seems to
| be around not giving people things they haven't worked
| for and don't deserve.
| haerra wrote:
| Uhm, I guess that you have some inner frustrations, as I
| have yet to meet someone who thinks that healtcare is
| literally free.
| fakedang wrote:
| If you're talking about people who for some reason don't
| understand European tax laws (which is a lot of people in
| the mainland and in the US), yeah I'm quite frustrated.
|
| My issue is with people who pay nil significant taxes in
| Europe gloating ignorantly about how European Healthcare
| is free, and won't stop shitting on American Healthcare.
| Yeah, your healthcare is cheaper than the US but it isn't
| free. There is a whole bunch of middle class folks and
| upper class folks paying for it. And I'm not even
| supporting the American model.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Yeah well I'm a European who was in the middle tax
| bracket before fleeing communism to move to China and I
| can tell you: the situation in Europe is unsustainable
| with all the youth and elders voting for "free
| healthcare" (it's so hard to make them understand it's
| free for them but oh so expensive for many others) while
| the people who actually find ways to produce a bit of
| value foreigners might be interested in, work for free to
| pay for it...
|
| The American healthcare system is not an healthcare
| system, it's a disgrace. The European ones are vast
| communist machines that can't pay for themselves. The
| best is the one I see here in Hong Kong: you pay small
| taxes for it, you pay for anything non critical, you get
| a socialized base service of average quality with very
| very good private healthcare that you pay for. And a
| network of banks providing health insurance for an okay
| price.
|
| For instance, you can use taxpayers money to give birth
| if you want, but you don't choose the date, you don't get
| a room for long and no way you get a C-Section unless you
| risk dying. In the private hospital you pay a lot, get
| all those things, but it's not at all necessary.
|
| I really like this compromise, which in hindsight just is
| obvious and shows you the shark Americans and the hippies
| Europeans just can't make compromises. You shouldn't have
| to die because you can't afford a surgery, and you
| shouldn't have to work 4 months a year for the State
| because it can't afford to give surgery for every wart on
| every butthole.
| oblio wrote:
| > The European ones are vast communist machines that
| can't pay for themselves.
|
| Do you have any proof of that?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| A family member is an expert in this area working for the
| government in a high position for a long time and they
| update quarterly the estimations on when the system will
| fall, not if. The current calculation is less than 15
| years and it is fairly constant for the past 10-15 years.
| In the discussions they have between countries the
| situation varies a lot, from countries that are going
| from default to default like Greece) or close (PIGS) to
| countries that are almost stable (Germany), but on
| average the situation is bad.
|
| For example I was told 10 years ago never to expect to
| retire because there will be no money for the public
| pension system when I will have the age. It is on an
| accelerating fall and the politicians are messing it up
| even further, pensions were increased by law by 40% about
| a year ago: if there is no future, you can start ruining
| the present.
| ptsneves wrote:
| This is a bit of a misterpretation. Yes they make that
| calculation but to know how to adjust the age of
| retirement and because there are shunt laws that limit
| the expenditure to a given percentage of gdp.
|
| Portugal(p in pigs) is such a country and this shunt law
| is a 2/3 law meaning if debt ceilings are overridden by
| government or parliament it will be struck down by the
| constitutional court. just recently there was such a law
| and it was promptly sent there. E
| FireBeyond wrote:
| When I left Australia, which is now 14 years ago, so
| grain of salt: you paid 1% income tax for Medicare,
| unless you were above a certain income level, in which it
| became 1.5%. If you opted out of the system, you could
| purchase private insurance, and would not be subject to
| this tax. There was a floor, where below or near "minimum
| income" levels, you were also not required to pay this
| tax.
|
| > For instance, you can use taxpayers money to give birth
| if you want, but you don't choose the date, you don't get
| a room for long and no way you get a C-Section unless you
| risk dying.
|
| This makes absolutely no sense. Short of induction
| agents, which have varying degrees of efficacy, if you're
| not getting a C-section, the healthcare industry,
| hospital, don't decide when you give birth, you/your baby
| do.
| fakedang wrote:
| I don't know why you want to draw comparisons to the
| Australian system here. We're comparing European to
| American, and the vast amount of ignorant thought in
| Europe about how healthcare is free.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Because the comment I replied to mentioned nothing to do
| with Europe?
|
| > There never has been and will never be 'free healthcare
| for all' - its not free, it's only free for some people
| if some other people pay for it.
|
| That's what I replied to. I also mentioned living with
| one European system, and a similar Australian system that
| are both largely considered "effectively free (or at
| least, out of pocket)", and how no-one living under
| either system that I've been a part of, thinks that their
| healthcare is "literally free".
|
| In fact, most of the tropes about "It's not really free,
| you're paying for it with taxes!" come from Americans
| bemoaning the insidious evil that they consider
| "healthcare for all" systems to be. It's a straw man,
| built up by some to decry "socialism".
| nl wrote:
| (Australian here)
|
| Note that the 1% (or 1.5%) Medicare levy doesn't fully
| fund the health system here.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I opened my last paycheck, the tax is 10% (Eastern
| Europe).
|
| There is some undeniable truth in this discussion: people
| with higher income pay for the people with lower income.
| 10% of 100,000EUR is a lot more than 10% of 20,000EUR.
| emj wrote:
| Considering disposable income; 10% of 100,000EUR is alot
| less, taxes are not noticable for me as a high income
| earner.
| kelnos wrote:
| And so what? That's how a functioning society should
| work. I would much rather have 90kEUR after health care
| taxes than 18kEUR; the higher earner is still coming out
| far ahead.
|
| It's not like the private insurance system is "equitable"
| either. I am very healthy and hardly ever need to see a
| doctor, but my insurance comes in at around $650/mo
| (mostly paid by my employer, but the money still has to
| come from somewhere). I definitely do not incur anywhere
| near $650/mo in health care costs of my own; I'm paying
| for care for people much sicker than I am, who incur
| health care costs higher than what they pay into
| insurance.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Because 20K is a smaller number than 100K.
|
| Taxes work with the basic assumption that people need
| some money to live, there is a humanitarian aspect to it
| if you see the govt positively or you can say, people in
| govt dont like thier head too far away from their
| bodies..
| andybak wrote:
| > before fleeing communism to move to China
|
| Is there some level of humour here that I'm missing? (and
| yes I know all the subtleties around the Chinese system.
| But still - that's a heck of a sentence to throw out
| uncritically)
| fakedang wrote:
| He makes a lot of valid points about the unsustainability
| of the European system, but yeah couldn't help a chuckle
| at that line.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The "valid points" about how socialism will surely drive
| all of Europe bankrupt within the next decade have been
| repeated for the last seventy years. I'm sure they're
| right _this_ time, though.
| fakedang wrote:
| Of course, the European model is extremely sustainable if
| you can ignore the not insignificant amount of cost
| cutting and lack of coverage of certain drugs for orphan
| diseases. You can literally just talk to any doctor or
| nurse in the NHS system and ask them about how quality of
| care has declined over the past decade, while their
| professionals' workload has only increased unsustainably.
| And we're talking about one of the best run healthcare
| systems in Europe here.
|
| It's of course nothing like the American system which is
| a bastardization of Healthcare, but it's no utopia
| either. Costs of delivering healthcare have increased in
| Europe mostly due to wasteful spending.
|
| I don't know if you bothered to read his points after the
| first line, but he clearly outlined the Asian model of
| healthcare, and clearly criticizes the American model.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > lack of coverage of certain drugs for orphan diseases
|
| This is literally the case in the US too. It's not
| "right" in Europe, when it happens, nor is it in the US.
|
| US pharma companies have, repeatedly, discontinued
| cheaper, and in some cases, the only effective,
| medications when they've deemed them not profitable
| enough.
| jxramos wrote:
| I don't get it, isn't China communist too. Has that
| become an in name only thing? But yah there's no silver
| bullets as someone likes to say, tradeoffs are something
| adults recognize and have to manage.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > the situation in Europe is unsustainable with all the
| youth and elders voting for "free healthcare" (it's so
| hard to make them understand it's free for them but oh so
| expensive for many others)
|
| I think you might misunderstand how the systems work.
| First of all, there is no such thing as European
| healthcare. Every country has their own system. In
| Germany for instance, 14.6% of your post tax income go
| towards healthcare (capped at a post tax income of EUR
| 58.050). No one thinks it's free and it isn't free for
| anybody except for those who really cannot afford it
| which have never heard anyone critizise.
| ZuLuuuuuu wrote:
| That is not reality, that is what American right thinks
| about European people. We of course know that we are
| paying for healthcare with our taxes, but we also know
| that in the end what we pay is lower than what we would
| pay without a government healthcare system. So we chose
| this healthcare system consciously.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| As someone who was born under the NHS in Scotland, grew
| up in Australia under its Medicare system (and the
| introduction of partial privatiz(s)ation), and has lived
| in the US since 2006, no-one is laboring under that
| misapprehension. Medicare tax is indeed a line item on
| Australian taxation paperwork.
| fakedang wrote:
| I don't know where you get the impression that I'm
| criticizing the NHS or a nationalized Healthcare service.
| I'm all for a nationalized healthcare service. My issue
| is with people who pay nil significant taxes in Europe
| gloating ignorantly about how European Healthcare is
| free, and won't stop shitting on American Healthcare.
| Yeah, your healthcare is cheaper than the US but it isn't
| free. There is a whole bunch of middle class folks and
| upper class folks paying for it.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Bruh.
|
| You have deep issues. No thinking thinks anything is
| free. Its free as in I can walk in get treated and walk
| out without having a cent or anyone asking about my
| credit details. The difference is in the quality of care
| as gov run hospitals have much tighter budget constraints
| and can't treat patients with as much delicacy as private
| medical institutions.
| fakedang wrote:
| > You have deep issues
|
| Thanks for the personal attacks. Highly appreciated /s
|
| > The difference is in the quality of care as gov run
| hospitals have much tighter budget constraints and can't
| treat patients with as much delicacy as private medical
| institutions.
|
| Yet somehow places such as Singapore, Thailand and Japan
| manage to provide top notch healthcare even in government
| institutions, healthcare that is much better than most
| private European hospitals.
|
| And yes, my point was exactly about how a not
| insignificant number of people in Europe seem to think
| that their healthcare comes for free (because they don't
| pay tax for a variety of reasons).
| inopinatus wrote:
| No; everyone knows that goods and services, including
| those supplied by government, come at an economic cost.
|
| This slur of outright idiocy via economic illiteracy is
| fiction, and applying slurs to people from a specific
| region on the basis of their economic circumstances is
| bigotry 101, so the personal admonishment above is hardly
| surprising.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Sure. Personal attacks are uncalled for and I retract
| that part of my statement.
|
| But the rest of my points still stand.
| kelnos wrote:
| Even if there is a large group of people who believe
| that, why do you care so much? How do their beliefs, as
| foolish as they may be, actually negatively impact you?
| [deleted]
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| Just a thought, "paying nil significant taxes" would mean
| lower or nil income...? we could also include refugees,
| prisoners in that group I guess.... these people, may
| also be providing a huge extra to society in the form of
| being low paid, having future potential or not adding to
| externalisation costs such as increased infrastructure
| needs higher income earners do... also I think the main
| criticisms of the US health system is that insurance is
| in most cases part of the job contract and that there are
| huge (cost) inefficiencies due to insurers battling over
| coverage costs with health providers... as an aside I
| live in Romania and as a low income earner I forgoe
| insurance because it's a lot cheaper to get care when I
| need it
| jschwartzi wrote:
| > insurance is in most cases part of the job contract and
| that there are huge (cost) inefficiencies due to insurers
| battling over coverage costs with health providers.
|
| To say nothing of how maddening it is to have to change
| doctors every time we change jobs, or to lose coverage
| for certain conditions when we change jobs, or to have to
| perfectly time certain life events such as childbirth or
| pregnancy to either before or after we change jobs, or to
| make sure we don't get sick during the probationary
| period while we're changing jobs, and so on.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The more correct term for universal healthcare rather than
| free should be cheaper as everyone with such systems wind
| up spending much less on healthcare than the USA. We
| basically spend as much per capita on our public system
| than other countries do on healthcare overall, and then we
| also have a private system that is even more costly.
| [deleted]
| srmarm wrote:
| Yes / No
| luke2m wrote:
| Yes, that makes sense
| jesseryoung wrote:
| I work in healthcare software and recently did a spike building
| a voice assistant for the EMR. We compared Google, AWS, Azure
| and Nuance's voice and intent recognition and Nuance blew all
| the others out of the water. When it comes to understanding
| medical terminology Nuance is way ahead of anything other
| providers have.
|
| Dragon has been around for 23 years and has been THE product
| for VR in the medical field for at least the last 10 years
| (from my experience).
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I think in a lot of cases that is because they tried. You can
| tell 90% of Google's focus is ad consumers when they develop
| new services, whereas Nuance has sold medical-focused
| dictation tools for over a decade.
| conanbatt wrote:
| Oh wow. The Dragon headset is a very strange product space. It
| is used by non-tech savvy doctors to avoid having to type into
| the EMR.
| riahi wrote:
| It's not just the non tech savvy. It's substantially faster
| to dictate text than type it, especially if your hands are
| occupied with the computer doing something else (ie
| interpreting radiology exams, dictating a treatment course or
| visit note while simultaneously reviewing labs).
| tootie wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Nuance also does the Comcast Xfinity voice
| remotes. They are actually really well done. And it's a
| humongous customer to have your claws in.
| iFred wrote:
| They do. The amount of magic involved to make it work is
| amazing from an engineering perspective.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Universal remote control makes all Comcast remotes.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| It's literally better than Siri. I don't know how, but it is.
| I'd say it's even better than Alexa in terms of its ability
| to recognize things I say.
| tootie wrote:
| The biggest leg up they have is that their product works in
| a very controlled domain. Siri is out there trying to be a
| complete interactive AI human and failing miserably. The
| Xfinity remote just controls your TV and does it
| smashingly. I found the Alexa-driven voice control on my
| FireTV to also be a pleasant experience compared to regular
| Alexa.
| kelnos wrote:
| The TV remote only has to understand TV-related things,
| like inputs, channels, volume, and program names. Siri and
| Alexa have to understand _everything_.
| meroes wrote:
| Not true.
|
| "Xfinity Home, dim the bathroom lights to 40%"
|
| "Youtube Yuri Gagarin"
|
| Are both things it knows how to execute.
| tomcam wrote:
| I use Siri every day. Former radio guy. Siri is horrible
| even for me
| jxramos wrote:
| I think they've been at it for a pretty long time with old
| products like Dragon. A friend used to work there some
| years back and said they pretty much perfected speech
| detection up to some very reasonable error rate. I imagine
| they've just continued to cover all the dark corner cases
| and irregularities and accents etc.
| pie420 wrote:
| No, the real challenge now is how do you minimize the
| amount of processing power needed, or bandwidth needed,
| and how do you do all this while minimizing translation
| time to under 0.5 seconds.
|
| Obviously accents and irregularities are also areas I'm
| sure they are focusing on, but I imagine that optimizing
| for real time, mobile and low CPU power devices is a huge
| focus for them.
| geenew wrote:
| They ran dragon on contemporary computers, and that was
| very good at least 10 years ago, probably more. So they
| have voice recognition working well on what would now be
| considered very constrained hardware.
| marktangotango wrote:
| I have this and it really is quite remarkable. The entire
| voice integration in the x1 set top box is really polished.
| Other than the occasional "wow, this is pretty good for
| comcast!" I hadn't given it much thought until now.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Can you remove the ads from the EPG?
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| Microsoft already has relationships with Comcast [0] and
| nearly every major telecommunication around the world.
|
| [0] https://cloudsolutions.comcast.com/apps/64168/office-365#
| !ov...
|
| And 100% agreed, the voice is great on the Xfinity remote.
| Was very impressed.
| [deleted]
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Microsoft tried to buy TikTok's U.S. operations last year in a
| deal reportedly valued between $10 billion to $30 billion.
|
| >Reports suggest it's in advanced talks with gaming chat app
| Discord for a deal worth more than $10 billion.
|
| >A report in February suggested Microsoft was eyeing a takeover
| of Pinterest, worth $53 billion on the public market. Last
| September, it bought gaming giant ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion.
|
| Microsoft is in full yolo mode since all other big tech companies
| have antitrust lawsuit against them. Microsoft spent its time on
| the cross in the 1990s and early 2000s now they will acquire
| anything they can.
| CivBase wrote:
| MS's strategy as of late seems to be buying their way inyo
| being competitive in every market instead of dominating a few
| markets. I suppose this gives them a great deal of stability
| and allows them to develop a massive ecosystem of
| interconnected products and services. It's still a concerning
| practice... but not as obviously unethical as the monopolistic
| behavior displayed by other big tech companies.
| mrkramer wrote:
| This was their strategy since always or since they achieved
| monopoly in PC OS market which ensured them huge profits
| which they used to acquire competitors or to break into some
| industry or niche. They would push acquired product or
| service to millions of Windows users meaning they had huge
| distribution channel and scale potential.
|
| Microsoft's first acquisition was in 1987 of Forethought Inc.
| or developers of what is now Microsoft PowerPoint and they
| bought them for only $14m. Today PowerPoint as a product and
| as a brand is worth billions.
| paxys wrote:
| The fact that none of these companies are competing with
| Microsoft also makes it easier. That's not the strategy Google,
| Facebook etc. normally use.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Maybe they are not competing with them right now but they
| have aspirations to break into their industry and then
| compete with them. They figured out it was easier to acquire
| them than try to build it from the ground up.
| genericone wrote:
| Easier to acquire AND easier to divest from if there are
| any monopoly-related/law-related issues.
| CivBase wrote:
| Speech recognition in consumer electronics continues to be slow,
| unreliable, and a privacy nightmare. I can't tell you the last
| time I saw someone use it seriously. There are reasonable
| applications for it, but they are few and far between. I wonder
| what makes it worth $20B to MS.
|
| Top comment as I'm writing this says Nuance has a strong presence
| in the healthcare device market, but I'd be surprised if that
| alone was worth the purchase price.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Talking to Hololens?
| itsbits wrote:
| GitHub at 7.5 billion around 2019 looks like a steal.. weird
| other software giants didn't try for it..
| CuriousPerson23 wrote:
| A lot of the giant companies are really concerned about anti-
| trust. Microsoft is under pressure too, but there would be an
| uproar if Google or Apple bought given their pressure around
| the app store. Having access to the code that writes the apps
| would be tough to pull off...
| itsbits wrote:
| true...Google does have similar product which surely could
| have caused more anti trust uproar..MS in this space luckily
| doesn't have such issues..
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| 100% they tried. Can't imagine Google and Amazon not wanting
| GitHub.
|
| But with regards to big acquisitions, MS is ironically and
| quite surprisingly able to fly under the radar in terms of
| antitrust. Literally every other tech company is not.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Microsoft can see a lot of data which means they can have
| plenty of dirt on people involved in anti trust stuff. Beyond
| certain point companies can do what they want.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I'd guess its a bit less irony and more that by virtue of
| having already been through various high-profile antitrust
| investigations, MS is somewhat uniquely well positioned to
| understand how to avoid/manage similar scrutiny in the
| future.
| aloisdg wrote:
| True GitHub is where the community is.
| Maven911 wrote:
| For those wondering some of Nuance strengths in speech: Multiple
| award winning Very domain oriented and not just general speech
| Supports many languages
|
| They have also had a boost in stock with covid and more people
| using remote speech services
| dalbasal wrote:
| I think a lot of big acquisitions make "sense," given the current
| market.
|
| The most successful companies have lots of cash, high share
| prices, and amazing cash cows. They _could_ borrow for (almost)
| free, so resources are practically unlimited. Their R &D is
| already well funded. Most of their big, growth oriented
| endeavours are not cash-constrained. There are usually no
| factories to build or production to scale up.
|
| Google tried "20% time." They tried "let many flowers grow."
| Those things seemed ambitious at 2007-scale. In 2021 terms... new
| flowers need to be S&P 500 companies to represent growth, instead
| of just clutter. "Meaningful growth," for Alphabet, is a big
| number.
|
| How else does a MSFT, Google or (especially) FB put $20bn to
| work? Acquiring "just works."
|
| Of course, there are in-house alternatives. Waymo is an in-house
| investment by Alphabet that's bigger than this Nuance
| acquisition... especially if you consider the $bns Waymo will
| continue to need until some unknown future date. Self driving is
| looking more hopeful (certainly to investors) than it was when
| waymo started.... but waymo is still a dubious investment.
|
| Consider that Google could have bought any car company, for about
| as much as waymo will cost eventually. Car companies have loans,
| so you could quibble the math... but details.
|
| Acquiring is easy. The path of least resistance wins >50% of the
| time. We have that dynamic here, both in the human/managers sense
| and in the arbitrage-like incentives in the market currently.
| bombcar wrote:
| Acquiring is a simple way to show the Board/Shareholders that
| you're "doing something" - but I suspect it's rarely very
| successful in the long run. Unless you acquire a business that
| ACTUALLY provides some synergies you're just on the path of
| transitioning from a successful company to a poor imitation of
| Berkshire Hathaway.
|
| It does have the advantage that you can "spin off" your
| acquisitions once they fail to do anything interesting (though
| this is more commonly seen in sunset industries/dying companies
| (see AOL, Compaq, etc)).
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I think this was once true, but is significantly less so in
| the context of cloud platforms. It's very easy from a
| business model standpoint for Microsoft to integrate Nuance
| NLP modules with Azure and start selling access to them at
| list prices very quickly.
|
| You don't need to hunt new customers with a marketing plan;
| you likely already have customers with these needs in your
| pipeline so it's a matter of making sure your AEs know what's
| happening. Everything is simpler at scale in a cloud business
| model, which is why these 3 companies in particular are
| eating the world.
| CerealFounder wrote:
| Its rarely the syngeries that make it work, instead its often
| they bought a business they leave alone that has much more
| room to grow.
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDK if it's rare that synergies work, so much that it's
| common for synergies to fail.
|
| Consider Google. They acquired Youtube, Android... Google's
| skillset was perfect for taking these proving concepts and
| making them 1080px, so to speak. Now, Youtube and android
| feed users & data to the adwords cash machine. Youtube and
| android defend the adwords castle, denying competitors.
| Fantastic synergy.
|
| OTOH, no company will ever find a synergy with ebay. They
| have spiky bits where companies are supposed to have
| copulation bits.
| _delirium wrote:
| Google acquiring YouTube also had good synergy because it
| caused bandwidth costs to plummet, which YouTube was
| having a hard time managing as a startup. The company was
| bleeding money on bandwidth, because they were an end
| user who had to pay an upstream ISP for transport [1].
| Once Google acquired them, suddenly they're on
| effectively a backbone network and have settlement-free
| peering with all kinds of other networks. That drove
| bandwidth costs down to near zero according to one
| analysis [2].
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-
| bandwidth-or...
|
| [2] https://www.wired.com/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/
| dalbasal wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Also, " _just give it as much resources as it needs, we
| 're rich_" was a game google had already proved willing
| to win with gmail.
|
| It's easy to lay the tactic out in retrospect. Fund
| "resource hogs" that users don't pay for. Bet on long
| term bandwidth costs going down. Bet on major consumer
| monopolies being valuable, long term. Sounds great and it
| was great.
|
| OTOH, _lets pour $mns into a "business" that we bought
| for $bns, that has no revenue... because in 15 years we
| will be worth $trns and it will all sound like
| peanuts_... this was once considered imprudent business
| planning. Google were willing to do it. Others weren't.
| Only a few even could.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| Can't you just acquire a successful business and then do
| nothing? Just let the business you acquired keep being
| successful? It's not that different from investing in the
| stock market, except that you can have more control over the
| business you acquired if you need to down the line. You also
| then own their IP, which might be the most important part.
| benreesman wrote:
| I think that's what GP meant by poor imitation of BH.
| perardi wrote:
| Apple has had some decent ones. P.A. Semi, notably. And for
| $278 million dollars, the ROI on that was ludicrous.
|
| But overall, yes. I can think of so many large-scale
| acquisitions that didn't go so swimmingly. -
| AOL/Time-Warner - Ford/its stable of luxury brands like
| Jaguar and Land Rover - Compaq/HP -
| Daimler/Chrysler
|
| It seems like these "big" mergers tend to now show the
| synergies people promise. Maybe it's just too much culture to
| integrate.
| mbesto wrote:
| Tech M&A guy here.
|
| This is survivorship bias at its finest.
|
| How about Facebook's acquisition of Instagram? Google's
| acquisition of YouTube? Android? DoubleClick? Amazon's
| acquisition of Twitch? I could go on.
|
| For the record, yes there are VERY many acquisitions that
| go wrong, especially when you get to the $B+ value. The
| parent's characterization seems in line with the "no one
| ever got fired for using IBM" and that sentiment is grossly
| unjustified for M&A. There are a bunch of other factors
| that go into corporate strategy. One example - buying a
| competitor to eliminate competition and thus protecting
| future dollars.
| bredren wrote:
| Skype's eventual acquisition by Microsoft is an interesting
| one.
|
| Can anyone contextualize the horse trading that led to
| that?
|
| >September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.
|
| In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and
| the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the
| acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay.
|
| Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
| tambourine_man wrote:
| >Apple has had some decent ones. P.A. Semi, notably
|
| And, let's not forget, NeXT.
|
| Probably one of the best U$400 something million ever
| spent.
| microtherion wrote:
| It's funny how there seems to be so little correlation
| between acquisition prices and eventual value. The PA
| Semi acquisition was an enormous success at what was at
| the time a tiny price. NeXT was an enormous success,
| though $400M at the time was a bet-the-farm price for
| Apple.
|
| In contrast, while I'm sure Beats has easily paid for
| itself, $3B was not exactly cheap, and the results were
| not 10x PA Semi.
| mbesto wrote:
| I think it's impossible to accurately determine the ROI
| of an acquisition with incomplete data. There's way too
| many factors at play.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I remember people being flabbergasted by the price they
| paid for PA Semi. Dividing the price by the number of
| engineers seemed indeed ludicrous. And yet, here we are.
| microtherion wrote:
| At the time, there were only 3 comments on HN I could
| find. One of them was certainly questioning the decision:
| [1]
|
| But wmf was right on the money [2]: "Maybe Apple thinks
| they can outdo the Cortex".
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171511
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171879
| perardi wrote:
| I thought about NeXT, but that was a bit of a weird one,
| because NeXT executives and technology replaced _a lot_
| of Apple's executives and technology. That ended up being
| a stealth takeover by NeXT.
| mbesto wrote:
| > you're just on the path of transitioning from a successful
| company to a poor imitation of Berkshire Hathaway.
|
| You mean Berkshire Hathaway, that's current market cap is
| ~$615B and hails arguably one of the most successful
| investors of all time as its CEO? That Berkshire?
|
| I don't know about you, but I'd happily be just 1/100th as
| successful as how that model turned out.
| ffggvv wrote:
| google maps and youtube and instagram were acquisitions
|
| 2/3 of those arguably are among the most important parts of
| their respective companies
| dalbasal wrote:
| I was actually thinking " _Satya, you know that Berkshire is
| you end game here... right?_ "
|
| I agree, but I think MSFT (and friends) are in this
| predicament no matter what. What's the alternative?
|
| That said, I don't really think BRK is the end game.
|
| For one thing, Berkshire is kind of an exception. There are
| plenty of smaller conglomerates that _are_ actually like
| Berkshire, but most pretend not to be conglomerates. They
| pretend to be far more cohesive & synergetic than Berkshire.
|
| Also, Alphabet shows that synergies can be easy to find.
| Youtube, Android... This generation's acquisitions need to be
| 10X bigger than that. But... these companies are in uncharted
| waters. No company has wielded free resources at the scale
| that MSFT now operates. They aren't the only one currently,
| but they don't have predecessors... unless we go back to VOC
| or somesuch.
|
| OTOH... Satya is accidentally in the same position Buffet
| intentionally sought: Sitting on a pile of capital that must
| be allocated.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I agree, but I think MSFT (and friends) are in this
| predicament no matter what. What 's the alternative?_
|
| Well, they can just stop growing, and continue doing what
| works. If that thing stops working (or they have a good
| belief that it will stop working before too long), they
| have two options: 1) do nothing, and gradually wind the
| company down and return capital to shareholders so they can
| reinvest it elsewhere, or 2) pivot, and accept that the
| things they are pivoting to will be a rounding error in
| their finances for years while they grow.
|
| Obviously this is disastrous in our current economic
| system; a company that tried this would watch its stock
| price fall into the toilet before too long. But absent
| that, why not?
|
| Consolidation is what will bring us to a corporate-run
| dystopia. I would much rather the world be filled mostly
| with small and medium sized businesses, with every market
| open to a lot of competition and even cooperation (on
| standards, not on prices). But I know, that's just a pipe
| dream, and humans generally suck at cooperation when money
| is involved.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> a company that tried this would watch its stock price
| fall into the toilet.. But absent that, why not?
|
| lol
|
| >> Consolidation is what will bring us to a corporate-run
| dystopia. I would much rather the world be filled mostly
| with small and medium sized businesses...
|
| The alternative to that is trust busting, perhaps. I was
| commenting on the market logic, so to speak. If we're
| optimistic, maybe it'll be a corporate-run utopia. Zuck's
| not great, but I think this generation is kinder than the
| Carnegie/Rockefeller days.
|
| Look... if Bezos, Zuck, and such continue on trend,
| they'll soon be very rich. Bigger than the Rockefeller.
| Their companies will be one par with the VOC/EIC in terms
| of market cap, but I don't know if it's really comparable
| to that.
|
| Google/FB are sketchy, if trust-busting comes into play.
| Advertising is sensitive to both regulation and
| trustbusting. A ban on snooping, manipulation and overly
| vigorous advertising would hurt advertising. Trust-
| busting, like separating adwords from google, hurts
| advertising monopolies too.
|
| Meanwhile, what happens if a regulator messes up and
| breaks FB? Would the world lack for social messaging
| media? If Ford stops making cars, fewer cars are made in
| the world. If fewer FB likes happen, more sploosh
| sploshes happen and all is well in the world...
|
| More likely though, no help is coming. That being the
| case, I think the tech bros aren't the worst candidates
| for trillionaire status. Someone had to be it. I'm glad
| it isn't the real estate bros.
| pedrocr wrote:
| > I agree, but I think MSFT (and friends) are in this
| predicament no matter what. What's the alternative?
|
| Returning money to shareholders is the common solution for
| when you don't know how to grow more and profitability in
| the businesses you're already in and don't have any
| particular advantage in entering new ones. I'm not saying
| that's what they should be doing but sitting on a pile of
| capital that you don't know what to do with isn't a new
| problem that we need to invent new solutions for.
| nemothekid wrote:
| My own uneducated position is that is a new problem
| because shareholders _don 't_ want their money back.
| Shareholders have been piling money into stocks [1], so
| if you gave them the money back they would likely just
| put it right back into Microsoft (or, more likely, it
| would signal that Microsoft doesn't know what to do with
| the money, so people would pull out of Microsoft to
| invest somewhere else).
|
| [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-money-poured-
| stocks-past...
| dalbasal wrote:
| "Returning money to shareholders" is largely a
| consequence macroeconomic policy or state of affairs. It
| is, evidently, not actually a choice that CEOs currently
| have in practice. Dividends and/or buybacks are one of
| the powers shareholders do tend to wield, in practice.
| They want to invest more, not less.
|
| Also, IDK if it _is_ a common solution. Nothing is really
| common at MSFT-scale. A free cash flow like Google,
| Alphabet, etc. is almost unprecedented.
|
| Meanwhile, I do actually think that this is better for
| shareholders. IMO "Synergies" is a term somewhere between
| euphemism and a boomerism but for the purpose of
| "shareholder value" it doesn't matter. At
| Monopoly/Unicorn/FAANG scale, there are big opportunities
| for synergy. Think Google-Android.
|
| Why is Nuance being owned by Alphabet less efficient than
| being traded independently or owned by private investors?
| Why is Alphabet owning vanguard more efficient than
| owning Nuance?
|
| The answer to those question can have no actual impact on
| reality. If the acquired business is cash generative,
| they can left to their devices. If the parent company
| doesn't borrow, then "efficiency" never becomes explicit.
| Explicit efficiency is relative to cost of borrowing.
| Implicit efficiency is implied by share prices... and at
| this point things get foggy.
| john_moscow wrote:
| Based on my personal experience, since 2008 more and more
| companies are about showing somebody that you are "doing
| something" with their money. It could be the VCs, it could be
| the EU grants, it could be the stockholders, but that's the
| business model you get with the abundance of capital and low
| interest rates.
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