Ngl, that’s a genius headline
I did a double take when I first read it. Then I realized it was, Nothing, the phone company.
I did not even realize until reading this comment that Nothing was a company.
“this is a company for grown ups.”
That’s too bad. I was thinking of getting their phone when I needed a new one, I guess I’ll just add them to my mental list of companies to avoid.
I’m a grown up. I’ve been remote for a decade. I’m pretty successful too.
goddamn i read parts of the article trying to figure out which company… Im not a marketing guy, but nobody can tell me that “nothing” is marketable brand.
Allow me to introduce you to their main competitor, elon musk.
Oh, I don’t mean competitor in the business market. I mean their main competitor for worlds least marketable brand identity.
He took twitter, which had it’s own global brand awareness, and blundered it so bad that every media company refers to it as “X (formerly twitter)” because they know that if they had just put X, nobody would know what the hell they were talking about.
And his other company is literally named “The Boring Company”. Where I assume they make disease, and murderous robots that are somehow racist.
It’s still unbelievable considering Twitter had made its way into other languages’ lexicon other than English. In Spanish, for example, the word “tuit” had been added officially in the dictionary. It had no competitors in brand awareness and all it took was a manchild with money to burn to take it all down.
Clearly it’s not a company for grown ups because you think they’re all children that won’t play together unless you cram them into a classroom and tell them, “Make nice.”
“this is a company for grown ups.”
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. – C.S. Lewis
Part of it is literally named teenage engineering! The division working on the earbuds.
"Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
Sounds like he actually means it’s a company for exploitable young people and socopathic assholes. Grown-ups have other responsibilities and don’t want work to commandeer their whole lives.
“This company is for grown ups. Now sit over there where I can check on you constantly and do what I tell you like a child that can’t be trusted alone.”
The actual sentence, according to a Verge website comment, was: “This is a company for grown ups, so if you need to be out of office to deal with some issues, we trust you to make the right decision.” If true, this doesn’t reflect well on Verge journalism.
The real problem is that Nothing brings… nothing to the table. Oh look, another startup making another Android phone in a sea of companies making Android phones, with yet another skin.
This just means they’re a struggling company who needs to cut headcount and want to do it without paying severance
In addition, this tactic will result in the best employees leaving first, because they’ll get employed somewhere else.
Cue the pivot to some ridiculous buzz tech like AI in the near future, then being acquired and promptly abandoned by some big corp.
The thing with AI is, what the term today refers to most often is neural networks, which are really advanced statistics. And the thing is, to get more precise statistics, you need exponentially more data. And of course the marginal utility decays exponentially. So exponentially increasing marginal expenses meet exponentially decaying marginal utility.
The way this usually works out is you loose all the good employees and you’re left with the dregs who were unable to find another remote position in time.
