You are equating higher cost with better quality. There usually is a correlation, but with US healthcare's opaqueness with prices, I wouldn't make that correlation.
Leaving aside that, people do in fact make medical decisions based on cost. For example, for angioplasty there are two options - a medicated stent and a non-medicated, regular stent. The medicated stent is more expensive than the normal one. When it came to choosing one for my father, I chose a medicated one only because I was paying through insurance. But many of the patients out here in India don't have insurance. In that case there is a definite probability that a lower cost one will be chosen. Another example is dialysis. The frequency at which people perform dialysis is directly related to cost and affordability.
It is not always a given that patients would go for the absolute best.
How does one go about eating the sun or the trillion trillion watts produced by sun? You need all that energy converted to something edible - that means there is at least one job, agriculture. If you can automate that, then there is the job of automation engineer. And so it goes...
Photosynthesis is ridiculously inefficient at anything but building physical materials. And it would require a whole lot of human intervention to capture more than the pinprick of insolation that happens to fall on the non-arctic, non-desert parts of planet Earth (rather than waste off into space).
(1) Asking for a feature and then never showing up once when it is being built. "Hey, we are adding this page here. Is it okay?" <No answer>. "Hey, is this workflow good?" <No answer>. Once implemented, come around and ask "Why is this built this way?"
(2) Not being interested in any feature that engineering is interested in.
It is okay to talk to customers all the time, but once in a while turn around and talk to engineering too.
Allowing foreign investment is a minor problem in ecommerce space. Flipkart has foreign investment via VCs for quite some time.
There are a lot more fundamental issues in ecommerce space.
(1) Low penetration of credit cards - Banks have slowed down considerably their efforts to market credit cards. RBI regulations don't help either. Besides both of these, people have a negative feeling towards credit cards. So credit card usage is low. Cash is king and debit cards and direct bank transfers are next.
(2) Payment is a pain. Paying via credit card, debit card or bank account goes through a two step authentication process which is fraught with failures. There are multiple sites through which payment is routed => Seller site -> Payment gateway intermediary -> Bank site -> (enter password to authenticate payment) -> Back to intermediary -> Back to seller site. This long chain is breaks more often than not. And when it breaks, it becomes a pain to get your money back. Buying something online, especially for some one new is a heart-in-your-mouth experience. Again, RBI guidelines prevent any change in the payment process. It is easier to use Cash on Delivery (CoD).
(3) Two and three means that most customers prefer CoD. But CoD is a pain for merchants. There is no guarantee that customers would end up completing the sale. Most purchases are impulse purchases. But in case of CoD, you receive the product after 2-3 days, long after the impulse is gone. So the rejection rate for CoD sales is high compared to Credit/debit card sales.
(4) Logistics is another nightmare. The companies do not have scale and are quite expensive compared to the cost of goods sold. They are also not reliable. Delivery management and providing customer support for late/missing shipments forms the bulk of support cost. So any medium/large ecommerce company starts its own courier service. Suddenly these companies are not just ecommerce companies, they are also managing a completely new and different business.
(5) Low internet penetration and usage.
(6) Wafer thin margins. The margins are already thin. It is spread even thinner by offering free shipping. Shipping used to be free for any product of any cost. Its only now that companies have started charging for shipping. These thin margins mean companies won't be breaking even any time soon. Its a long haul game and its going to leave quite a few dead companies in its midst.
>Flipkart has foreign investment via VCs for quite some time.
Because of this they had to separate Flipkart.com and their frontend operations (WS Retail).
The VC money is now invested in Flipkart.com which is a marketplace similar to Amazon India. But they are pretty well integrated with one of their sellers (WS Retail).
Derek Lowe has real high class humor. I always end up knowing new things while laughing like a maniac. It just makes things a little awkward at office though. I always had to keep watching over my shoulder just so that no one would notice that I was reading things which can blow up with explosive power which will make TNT feel like baby powder and laughing like a maniac :)
Some one did both to our startup. It was one of the most productive meetings that I had. The conclusion that we needed to shut shop was pretty clear after that meeting. It was something that I guess we knew already, but needed validation (you know how much founders hang on to hope).
So yes, if an idea sucks, say "it sucks." It will be a revelation.
Its not a troll comment. I just spent 3 hours poring over how CUPS worked in 12.04 and trying to find out why my USB printer is not working. I just could not fix it and rebooted my laptop to Windows to print. And this after installing the official drivers and reading the official install guide, etc. The damned thing was that they have changed CUPS yet again in 12.04 and whatever the official docs says is not valid anymore.
This sort of thing has been there around Linux for ever. I have reached a stage where I am just too bored to do the endless investigation and fixing any more. I will just use Windows, which contrary to all the complaints that people keep making, actually "just works"
Sure it is, it's a short, inciteful quip that required little effort and provided absolutely nothing in the way support yet produced a 30-odd comment tangent, a solid 20% of all commentary. Pretty much the definition of a reasonably successful troll.
>I will just use Windows, which contrary to all the complaints that people keep making, actually "just works".
Because one of your anecdotes is worth more than all of theirs.
Steven Pinker's book 'The Stuff of Thought' deals with this sort of phrasing. And he explains it quite better than what I can. So here is the relevant excerpt from the book:
Why don't people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other's brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity--which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
The clearest example is ordinary politeness. When you are at a dinner party and want the salt, you don't blurt out, "Gimme the salt." Rather, you use what linguists call a whimperative, as in "Do you think you could pass the salt?" or "If you could pass the salt, that would be awesome."
Taken literally, these sentences are inane. The second is an overstatement, and the answer to the first is obvious. Fortunately, the hearer assumes that the speaker is rational and listens between the lines. Yes, your point is to request the salt, but you're doing it in such a way that first takes care to establish what linguists call "felicity conditions," or the prerequisites to making a sensible request. The underlying rationale is that the hearer not be given a command but simply be asked or advised about one of the necessary conditions for passing the salt. Your goal is to have your need satisfied without treating the listener as a flunky who can be bossed around at will.[1]
Analytically minded people would do well to pick up this book and try to understand the science behind our interactions.
Leaving aside that, people do in fact make medical decisions based on cost. For example, for angioplasty there are two options - a medicated stent and a non-medicated, regular stent. The medicated stent is more expensive than the normal one. When it came to choosing one for my father, I chose a medicated one only because I was paying through insurance. But many of the patients out here in India don't have insurance. In that case there is a definite probability that a lower cost one will be chosen. Another example is dialysis. The frequency at which people perform dialysis is directly related to cost and affordability.
It is not always a given that patients would go for the absolute best.