I am not sure you are entirely correct. Simple name recognition is frequently the biggest predictor of sales. As you say it would be more necessary for say Alfa Romero to be running ads in the US right now than it is for Audi but the car market is mostly not driven on impulse the way less durable products are. At some level you have to educate the consumer about the possibilities.
Wait I can get 500HP+ and 27mpg? Wow did not know that was possible. Might go look at cars now, might as well look at the company that just told me this...etc.
retail spending by consumers has only increased by an average of 2.4% per year.
In other words pretty close to the inflation rate. We might conclude from that consumer behavior really has not changed much at all at the macro level. One interesting question would be has online advertising impact the classes and types of products the retail dollars are chasing.
Even that does not work because a company like P&G has a pipe line. WallMart for example on of your re-sellers, has X units on hand all ready. You run an ad, Wallmart's sales change immediately yours do not.
A very metrics driven company like Wallmart probably responds pretty quickly by adjusting their re-order count so you get that data right away. Now how about Hussey's General Store in some rural mountain town in eastern Virginia? They sell more P&G product this month and little less of the competitor they also stock. How long before they adjust their behavior? Remember this guy does his reorders by walking the shelves and seeing how tall the stacks of stuff are... There is of course range of business in between with different inventory levels and distribution models. Regional grocers, more national grocers, Amazon, etc..
Its probably months before P&G can get a clear picture on the impact of any changes they make on sales.
Certainly don't and would never consider connecting something like that to the internet.
You certainly don't have a smart phone with Google Now or Siri on it.
I do but I keep those features disabled! Sure I suppose a malicious software update or something could turn them back on. Life carries some risks, a feature phone could probably be hacked to spy on me to, so there really isn't an viable alternative here.
How much do you trust Amazon to protect your privacy vs the manufacturer of your TV?
I trust both about equally maybe Amazon a little more because discovery of them violating privacy might hurt them a little more.
Sorry if you are stupid enough to allow some company to basically put a hot-mic in your home, well I don't feel sorry about any problems you encounter as a result of that.
they usually increase your drive and enable you to "act" before they improve your mood.
In other words they probably don't improve you mood at all, its going getting up and actually doing something that improves your mode over time.
Which isn't to say the drugs are not therefore useful in treating depression just that name causes a lot of confusion about how and why they work. Maybe we should call them 'drive-booters' instead.
I can see how exclusion could possible be both good or malicious but the other two not so much.
Malicious education isn't really education at all anymore, we have other words for that: lies, propaganda, brainwashing, gaslighting.
Exploitation by its very nature is well exploitative. You are turning someone eases efforts to your objectives and not theirs. Which you fundamentally have no right to do unless you want to talk about "useful idiots" and ends justifying the means. Which generally does not fly with contemporary moral thought.
Most programmers don't even know it is happening behind the scenes, and the protection they thought they have is lost
Some of the protection they thought they had is lost. Most the bugs at the driver layer are pretty well shaken out because they are so widely used and well tested. While its not impossible, Its still pretty unlikely.
The key is willing AND ABLE. You are clearly an experienced sailor, and would not go into a situation where you would yourself likely go from rescuer to victim.
Would you respond to a distress call from someone who was being attacked by a band of armed pirates? If you were captaining a large vessel with a sizeable crew that was also armed, maybe, but I doubt you'd charge in there just you and a buddy on your 27' sloop. It would be a mistake to do so you'd end up just being another victim and needed rescue yourself.
Here again its about capability. What concerns me here is that lots idiots have a handgun and a smart phone and will think that makes them them a John Wayne character.
The population of people with 27' sloops attempting water rescues is smaller and probably mostly with people responsible enough to do the things needed to own a keep boat like that, a strong indicator they have above average sense and decision making.
The app was withdrawn. So the update manager directs you to the app store. Now I guess it could be a little smarter and give you a message like "This app has been withdrawn, its recommended you remove it from your device".
If Apple removed it from your device for you'd be screaming bloody murder! So on balance I'd hardly call this a mess. Its not ideal but its damn near doing the right thing and keeps the implementation simpler.
See honestly its hard for me to see how they will be financially hurt by the breach.
A lot of noise has been made by execs selling stock. The thing is look at the pattern of these big breaches. All the major one have pretty much regained their market cap at some point. TJX, Target, Home Depot, PF Changs, the list goes on. Those are retail and by and would be pretty easy for consumers to avoid if they really cared to do so. They don't. The market has actually said breaches don't matter! There is a short term panic where everyone stays away and than they rapidly forget, and return to their old habits.
Equifax is better positioned then retail to weather this. I mean sure you can decide you are not paying to have you FICO score included on your annual free credit report! Wow that'll show'em! Its a tiny portion of their business. Otherwise their customers are not consumers but corporate lenders and large employers. In the end they care if the data they are getting on YOU is accurate, not how well its controlled. They will either go with the cheapest mostly reliable source or they are using multiple agencies and will probably continue to use Equifax.
Personally the CXOs that sold stock are probably smart, they know they can take profits today and probably buy it back cheaper next month sometime and ride it all the way back up to previous levels! Why because the fundamentals have not changed any so its almost a sure bet. Heck the moment I hear CONgress isnt going to do something crazy i'll probably buy too! Pretty much some kind of government intervention is the only thing that could actually hurt them as result of this.
That is very different. Things like police auxiliaries and CERT/NERT where citizens are identified, credentialed and given training to help out with a limited range of common needs is great idea! As far as disaster preparedness and response goes.
Having people download an app to play cop for a day in the way downloading uber lets you play cab driver is a different proposition entirely and sounds a lot more problematic to me.
Right, there are situations where you can be helpful and situations where you probably should leave it to the proper authorities.
Grabbing a shovel to help fill sand bags, [great] pitch in.
Rescuing someone being swept out to sea, [maybe] if you know you are a strong swimmer and perhaps have had some water front rescue training in the past. You need to be able to evaluate the risk you will yourself become a victim in need of rescue, if you are unsure you should probably just stay on shore keep your eyes on the victim or their last position so you can point them out when help arrives.
Running into a situation that maybe unclear with intent to help by brandishing and potentially using a lethal weapon [almost never] a good idea. If you happen to be one the scene when the trouble starts and have a clear picture of whats going on and are also defending yourself fine, I think its right and proper for you to have a fire arm and using it for self defense. Going and seeking out trouble with it is another matter.
Right because we don't have problems already because so many of our LEOs are laughably badly trained, just bad at their jobs, etc. Replacing them with any random citizen who downloaded an app is going to go just so very well.
No but it almost certainly is. Its pretty basic economics. Your manufacturing costs include both the units you sell and the units you are forced to replace. Tesla's Li batteries are not filled with some magic unicorn poop that makes them work differently than other Li batteries in terms of failure modes and life cycle. So its pretty obvious this is the plan.
It gives them both price discrimination (which you might find objectionable but I would call good business) and allows them to better match revenue to cost at the same time, which helps avoid hidden masks like cross subsidization and makes it easier to understand the business. Both are wins.
I don't know that it has. Whoever stole the data isn't going to just dump it online they are going to sell it. Eventually it will all leak but not before much of it is quite stale.
Most people STILL don't realize this but anyone who works for a company with a subscription to any of the private investigative services could pretty much get all this information inside of 30 seconds. Not everyone is in the pay-for-use-databases but most are. I don't know if I have ever had a search come back empty.
The reality is this information was already out there on almost everyone one, this will be just one more source. Maybe a price a little more attractive to the ner'er do wells but I predict a minor blip in increased id theft at most.
It might not be quite so simple as a pure money grab on Tesla's part. Many battery designs will last longer if you don't cycle them quite a deeply and if capacity does diminish but still is greater than what you paid for you'll never know and Tesla does not have to replace it.
Given they grantee the batteries for a period of the time the extra cost for the 'higher capacity' version might essentially be what amounts to a pre-paid insurance policy for the battery by actuarial spreading the cost of the increased likelihood the batters used at higher capacity will need replacing under warranty among the buyers of the higher capacity.
Right the big problem here is that there is not cost to the agencies to getting it wrong. If the report inaccurate information about it, it may cost you big, costs them nothing.
The 'free credit report' solution was BS. I it should not be my responsibility to verify on a regular basis some entity isnt spreading material falsehoods about me. Mind you making it my responsibility might be the only practical way, if we give the credit agencies the doubt and assume they at least try to get it right, they have no way to address the problem. They need to be penalized for forwarding bad information in some way. Maybe that is making it extra easy for libel(like) civil suits to succeed against this type of a business, with lower standards of proof of harm.
getting rid of the credit agencies won't have the effect most people seem to think it will.
Correct, yourself included.
Lenders won't magically assume everyone is credit-worthy if there's no way to check people's credit. They're going to assume everyone is not credit-worthy.
No! Most lenders won't make any assumptions at all they will do what was traditionally done they will determine if you have connections in the community, check into your reputation with past lenders and maybe even your pastor, get documentation from you about your income, its sources, etc, maybe drive past your house to see what your expenses really look like...
Slow, painful, and expensive as that process may be the would do because not lending means they don't make any money!
Unless you can prove you have enough money in the bank to cover the loan or collateral.
Again no in a lot of cases. That would exclude far to many customers. Its often the case that asset being purchased can collateralize the loan with a some kind of modest down payment as is common with mortgages. Unsecured loans would be harder to come by, I am sure banks would think twice about letting people run around with 10k credit card balances but there is so much money to be made of CCs even these would probably still be readily available to most consumers, though likely with a lower ceiling.
The 99% would have to pay the exorbitant interest rates formerly reserved only for people with poor credit.
Again no, while I can see rates going up to cover the extra costs of rendering credit decisions and likely higher defaults rates creditors would face with less information this simply isn't true. Many people would not borrow at those rates, so they'd loose to many customers taking that approach. Worse a competitive creditor that is able to more efficiently and correctly make credit decisions and offer better rates would get all the customers who actually are good credit risk. They will be able get a cheaper loan from the lender who has the due diligence part down and working well, leaving people who know they are in fact not good credit risks to go to the lenders who are unable to make good credit decisions; leaving them with a book of disproportionately bad business!
So credit would work differently. It would be say much harder to move to a new town where people don't know you and say buy a home there. Which would make people less mobile. I agree with you that on balance the credit agencies are probably a positive for most people and the economy, but lending went on before they existed and would continue if they suddenly vanished somehow.
On thought would be stop offering so much unsecured credit!
As long as their is asset of greater value than you are borrowing you can be forced to surrender there isnt a problem. Now the trick comes in preventing people from taking out multiple loans against the same asset, but that can be solved by having the creditor get to hold the deed.
Because it's money that could be spent elsewhere. Like compensation for employees, or new machinery, or bigger offices, etc. Or it could not be spent at all.
I am not a fan of the marketing department in general but lets be honest. On some level we know for many classes of products advertising both works and is probably needed to drive the sales numbers most manufactures/re-sellers/retailers etc are aiming for or need for economy of scale as opposed to some other activity like quality improvement, better employee compensation etc.
Also as a customer of facebook (ad buyer) you know how many units you actually end up moving. You probably know how many you were moving before you began facebook ad buys. That alone is enough to decide if facebook ad buys are worth it.
The other questions are really around conversion rates. If facebook says we showed your ad to 100 people and you got 10 orders that say they were referred by facebook, well that is a conversion rate of 10%. facebook charges you $X for 100 impressions. Alright suppose facebooks numbers are wrong and they only showed ads to 50 real people. facebook is effectively charging you double for each ad impression, but as I pointed out in the previous paragraph, that really does not matter. It was worth paying facebook $X dollars for the sales bump it generates or its not. It isn't like facebook is going to take less revenue if they have to revise their ad impression numbers down, they will just raise their rates because their current customers should recognize the value is really unchanged.
Now you might argue that say if other media are accurately reporting impressions, say AM radios numbers are spot on ( yeah right ) that facebook is making themselves look artificially effective in comparison. When FB was new that might have been true, but at this point its really its own unique medium and advertising elsewhere isn't really going to be like for like substitute.
At the end of the day where this probably matters is, back to those conversion rates. If my actual conversion rate is much higher than facebooks inflated numbers make it appear. I would think as an marketer I would want to spend more money running more of my ads on facebook not less! Where as if I think my conversion rate is low I might instead invest in producing new/different ad content, revising slogans or even revising the product!
Initially facebook needed to prove they could reach a lot people. There isnt much doubt of that now. Inflating impressions probably hurts their revenue rather than helps.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they never sued anybody for making compatible or interoperable implementations of.NET languages or class libraries
I think that has more to do with Mono never becoming much more than a toy for most and possibly useful to a very narrow set of special cases by a handful of enterprises who were unlikely to pick a Microsoft technology if they had to pony up.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not sure you are entirely correct. Simple name recognition is frequently the biggest predictor of sales. As you say it would be more necessary for say Alfa Romero to be running ads in the US right now than it is for Audi but the car market is mostly not driven on impulse the way less durable products are. At some level you have to educate the consumer about the possibilities.
Wait I can get 500HP+ and 27mpg? Wow did not know that was possible. Might go look at cars now, might as well look at the company that just told me this...etc.
retail spending by consumers has only increased by an average of 2.4% per year.
In other words pretty close to the inflation rate. We might conclude from that consumer behavior really has not changed much at all at the macro level. One interesting question would be has online advertising impact the classes and types of products the retail dollars are chasing.
Even that does not work because a company like P&G has a pipe line. WallMart for example on of your re-sellers, has X units on hand all ready. You run an ad, Wallmart's sales change immediately yours do not.
A very metrics driven company like Wallmart probably responds pretty quickly by adjusting their re-order count so you get that data right away. Now how about Hussey's General Store in some rural mountain town in eastern Virginia? They sell more P&G product this month and little less of the competitor they also stock. How long before they adjust their behavior? Remember this guy does his reorders by walking the shelves and seeing how tall the stacks of stuff are... There is of course range of business in between with different inventory levels and distribution models. Regional grocers, more national grocers, Amazon, etc..
Its probably months before P&G can get a clear picture on the impact of any changes they make on sales.
I'm sure you don't have a smart TV
Certainly don't and would never consider connecting something like that to the internet.
You certainly don't have a smart phone with Google Now or Siri on it.
I do but I keep those features disabled! Sure I suppose a malicious software update or something could turn them back on. Life carries some risks, a feature phone could probably be hacked to spy on me to, so there really isn't an viable alternative here.
How much do you trust Amazon to protect your privacy vs the manufacturer of your TV?
I trust both about equally maybe Amazon a little more because discovery of them violating privacy might hurt them a little more.
Sorry if you are stupid enough to allow some company to basically put a hot-mic in your home, well I don't feel sorry about any problems you encounter as a result of that.
So basically a diet rich in grass-fed beef! I have know that was the path to happiness for a long time. Good to know the science behind why!
they usually increase your drive and enable you to "act" before they improve your mood.
In other words they probably don't improve you mood at all, its going getting up and actually doing something that improves your mode over time.
Which isn't to say the drugs are not therefore useful in treating depression just that name causes a lot of confusion about how and why they work. Maybe we should call them 'drive-booters' instead.
I can see how exclusion could possible be both good or malicious but the other two not so much.
Malicious education isn't really education at all anymore, we have other words for that: lies, propaganda, brainwashing, gaslighting.
Exploitation by its very nature is well exploitative. You are turning someone eases efforts to your objectives and not theirs. Which you fundamentally have no right to do unless you want to talk about "useful idiots" and ends justifying the means. Which generally does not fly with contemporary moral thought.
Most programmers don't even know it is happening behind the scenes, and the protection they thought they have is lost
Some of the protection they thought they had is lost. Most the bugs at the driver layer are pretty well shaken out because they are so widely used and well tested. While its not impossible, Its still pretty unlikely.
The key is willing AND ABLE. You are clearly an experienced sailor, and would not go into a situation where you would yourself likely go from rescuer to victim.
Would you respond to a distress call from someone who was being attacked by a band of armed pirates? If you were captaining a large vessel with a sizeable crew that was also armed, maybe, but I doubt you'd charge in there just you and a buddy on your 27' sloop. It would be a mistake to do so you'd end up just being another victim and needed rescue yourself.
Here again its about capability. What concerns me here is that lots idiots have a handgun and a smart phone and will think that makes them them a John Wayne character.
The population of people with 27' sloops attempting water rescues is smaller and probably mostly with people responsible enough to do the things needed to own a keep boat like that, a strong indicator they have above average sense and decision making.
The app was withdrawn. So the update manager directs you to the app store. Now I guess it could be a little smarter and give you a message like "This app has been withdrawn, its recommended you remove it from your device".
If Apple removed it from your device for you'd be screaming bloody murder! So on balance I'd hardly call this a mess. Its not ideal but its damn near doing the right thing and keeps the implementation simpler.
See honestly its hard for me to see how they will be financially hurt by the breach.
A lot of noise has been made by execs selling stock. The thing is look at the pattern of these big breaches. All the major one have pretty much regained their market cap at some point. TJX, Target, Home Depot, PF Changs, the list goes on. Those are retail and by and would be pretty easy for consumers to avoid if they really cared to do so. They don't. The market has actually said breaches don't matter! There is a short term panic where everyone stays away and than they rapidly forget, and return to their old habits.
Equifax is better positioned then retail to weather this. I mean sure you can decide you are not paying to have you FICO score included on your annual free credit report! Wow that'll show'em! Its a tiny portion of their business. Otherwise their customers are not consumers but corporate lenders and large employers. In the end they care if the data they are getting on YOU is accurate, not how well its controlled. They will either go with the cheapest mostly reliable source or they are using multiple agencies and will probably continue to use Equifax.
Personally the CXOs that sold stock are probably smart, they know they can take profits today and probably buy it back cheaper next month sometime and ride it all the way back up to previous levels! Why because the fundamentals have not changed any so its almost a sure bet. Heck the moment I hear CONgress isnt going to do something crazy i'll probably buy too! Pretty much some kind of government intervention is the only thing that could actually hurt them as result of this.
That is very different. Things like police auxiliaries and CERT/NERT where citizens are identified, credentialed and given training to help out with a limited range of common needs is great idea! As far as disaster preparedness and response goes.
Having people download an app to play cop for a day in the way downloading uber lets you play cab driver is a different proposition entirely and sounds a lot more problematic to me.
Right, there are situations where you can be helpful and situations where you probably should leave it to the proper authorities.
Grabbing a shovel to help fill sand bags, [great] pitch in.
Rescuing someone being swept out to sea, [maybe] if you know you are a strong swimmer and perhaps have had some water front rescue training in the past. You need to be able to evaluate the risk you will yourself become a victim in need of rescue, if you are unsure you should probably just stay on shore keep your eyes on the victim or their last position so you can point them out when help arrives.
Running into a situation that maybe unclear with intent to help by brandishing and potentially using a lethal weapon [almost never] a good idea. If you happen to be one the scene when the trouble starts and have a clear picture of whats going on and are also defending yourself fine, I think its right and proper for you to have a fire arm and using it for self defense. Going and seeking out trouble with it is another matter.
Not always. Plenty of times people who are not prepared can make a situation worse.
Right because we don't have problems already because so many of our LEOs are laughably badly trained, just bad at their jobs, etc. Replacing them with any random citizen who downloaded an app is going to go just so very well.
Yes wanting to know what my bluray playing is up to when it calls home, makes me a bad person. Check
No but it almost certainly is. Its pretty basic economics. Your manufacturing costs include both the units you sell and the units you are forced to replace. Tesla's Li batteries are not filled with some magic unicorn poop that makes them work differently than other Li batteries in terms of failure modes and life cycle. So its pretty obvious this is the plan.
It gives them both price discrimination (which you might find objectionable but I would call good business) and allows them to better match revenue to cost at the same time, which helps avoid hidden masks like cross subsidization and makes it easier to understand the business. Both are wins.
I don't know that it has. Whoever stole the data isn't going to just dump it online they are going to sell it. Eventually it will all leak but not before much of it is quite stale.
Most people STILL don't realize this but anyone who works for a company with a subscription to any of the private investigative services could pretty much get all this information inside of 30 seconds. Not everyone is in the pay-for-use-databases but most are. I don't know if I have ever had a search come back empty.
The reality is this information was already out there on almost everyone one, this will be just one more source. Maybe a price a little more attractive to the ner'er do wells but I predict a minor blip in increased id theft at most.
It might not be quite so simple as a pure money grab on Tesla's part. Many battery designs will last longer if you don't cycle them quite a deeply and if capacity does diminish but still is greater than what you paid for you'll never know and Tesla does not have to replace it.
Given they grantee the batteries for a period of the time the extra cost for the 'higher capacity' version might essentially be what amounts to a pre-paid insurance policy for the battery by actuarial spreading the cost of the increased likelihood the batters used at higher capacity will need replacing under warranty among the buyers of the higher capacity.
Right the big problem here is that there is not cost to the agencies to getting it wrong. If the report inaccurate information about it, it may cost you big, costs them nothing.
The 'free credit report' solution was BS. I it should not be my responsibility to verify on a regular basis some entity isnt spreading material falsehoods about me. Mind you making it my responsibility might be the only practical way, if we give the credit agencies the doubt and assume they at least try to get it right, they have no way to address the problem. They need to be penalized for forwarding bad information in some way. Maybe that is making it extra easy for libel(like) civil suits to succeed against this type of a business, with lower standards of proof of harm.
getting rid of the credit agencies won't have the effect most people seem to think it will.
Correct, yourself included.
Lenders won't magically assume everyone is credit-worthy if there's no way to check people's credit. They're going to assume everyone is not credit-worthy.
No! Most lenders won't make any assumptions at all they will do what was traditionally done they will determine if you have connections in the community, check into your reputation with past lenders and maybe even your pastor, get documentation from you about your income, its sources, etc, maybe drive past your house to see what your expenses really look like...
Slow, painful, and expensive as that process may be the would do because not lending means they don't make any money!
Unless you can prove you have enough money in the bank to cover the loan or collateral.
Again no in a lot of cases. That would exclude far to many customers. Its often the case that asset being purchased can collateralize the loan with a some kind of modest down payment as is common with mortgages. Unsecured loans would be harder to come by, I am sure banks would think twice about letting people run around with 10k credit card balances but there is so much money to be made of CCs even these would probably still be readily available to most consumers, though likely with a lower ceiling.
The 99% would have to pay the exorbitant interest rates formerly reserved only for people with poor credit.
Again no, while I can see rates going up to cover the extra costs of rendering credit decisions and likely higher defaults rates creditors would face with less information this simply isn't true. Many people would not borrow at those rates, so they'd loose to many customers taking that approach. Worse a competitive creditor that is able to more efficiently and correctly make credit decisions and offer better rates would get all the customers who actually are good credit risk. They will be able get a cheaper loan from the lender who has the due diligence part down and working well, leaving people who know they are in fact not good credit risks to go to the lenders who are unable to make good credit decisions; leaving them with a book of disproportionately bad business!
So credit would work differently. It would be say much harder to move to a new town where people don't know you and say buy a home there. Which would make people less mobile. I agree with you that on balance the credit agencies are probably a positive for most people and the economy, but lending went on before they existed and would continue if they suddenly vanished somehow.
On thought would be stop offering so much unsecured credit!
As long as their is asset of greater value than you are borrowing you can be forced to surrender there isnt a problem. Now the trick comes in preventing people from taking out multiple loans against the same asset, but that can be solved by having the creditor get to hold the deed.
Because it's money that could be spent elsewhere. Like compensation for employees, or new machinery, or bigger offices, etc. Or it could not be spent at all.
I am not a fan of the marketing department in general but lets be honest. On some level we know for many classes of products advertising both works and is probably needed to drive the sales numbers most manufactures/re-sellers/retailers etc are aiming for or need for economy of scale as opposed to some other activity like quality improvement, better employee compensation etc.
Also as a customer of facebook (ad buyer) you know how many units you actually end up moving. You probably know how many you were moving before you began facebook ad buys. That alone is enough to decide if facebook ad buys are worth it.
The other questions are really around conversion rates. If facebook says we showed your ad to 100 people and you got 10 orders that say they were referred by facebook, well that is a conversion rate of 10%. facebook charges you $X for 100 impressions. Alright suppose facebooks numbers are wrong and they only showed ads to 50 real people. facebook is effectively charging you double for each ad impression, but as I pointed out in the previous paragraph, that really does not matter. It was worth paying facebook $X dollars for the sales bump it generates or its not. It isn't like facebook is going to take less revenue if they have to revise their ad impression numbers down, they will just raise their rates because their current customers should recognize the value is really unchanged.
Now you might argue that say if other media are accurately reporting impressions, say AM radios numbers are spot on ( yeah right ) that facebook is making themselves look artificially effective in comparison. When FB was new that might have been true, but at this point its really its own unique medium and advertising elsewhere isn't really going to be like for like substitute.
At the end of the day where this probably matters is, back to those conversion rates. If my actual conversion rate is much higher than facebooks inflated numbers make it appear. I would think as an marketer I would want to spend more money running more of my ads on facebook not less! Where as if I think my conversion rate is low I might instead invest in producing new/different ad content, revising slogans or even revising the product!
Initially facebook needed to prove they could reach a lot people. There isnt much doubt of that now. Inflating impressions probably hurts their revenue rather than helps.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they never sued anybody for making compatible or interoperable implementations of .NET languages or class libraries
I think that has more to do with Mono never becoming much more than a toy for most and possibly useful to a very narrow set of special cases by a handful of enterprises who were unlikely to pick a Microsoft technology if they had to pony up.