Comment by lotsofpulp
12 days ago
> When the question is “but how did you expect us to make good business under those conditions?”
There is no “make good” since there was no contract about long term expectations.
Even the media business’ leaders don’t know the future. Fewer eyeballs watching or listening to a specific piece of media means the cost has to be amortized over a smaller audience, meaning higher prices, or less quantity and quality of media.
Price volatility should be expected in a changing business environment, and the media business got rocked by increasing supply (Meta/ByteDance/video games/on demand historic catalogs/etc) in the last 20 years, as evidenced by the change in their market values.
It’s just business, so no one needs your sympathy, but it is also weird to see supposedly numerate people gripe about the effects of rapidly shifting supply and demand curves.
> but it is also weird to see supposedly numerate people gripe about the effects of rapidly shifting supply and demand curves
I suppose. But it is also weird to see supposedly numerate businesses repeatedly having the same trouble then blaming everyone else for it.
It is almost like they are deliberately running a long-term bait & switch everytime (see also another item coincidently on HN's front page today, Stop selling "unlimited", when you mean "until we change our minds").