Comment by ghaff 10 months ago
Forbes as a whole basically sold its soul for clicks. It used to be one of the three top business magazines depending on your preferences. After the web became dominant, at some point after Malcolm Forbes died, you ended up with a ton of blog writers--with plenty of biases and axes to grind--and essentially advertorial content.
Apple-focused journalists have historically been especially egregious. Nilay Patel and Josh Topolsky took their maddening approach of covering the Engadget homepage in inane, separate articles for every minute detail of a product announcement (starting with the iPad) to The Verge, and its "success" caused the strategy to propagate onward. No more concise write-ups; it's all about keeping you in a deathloop on the platform. Gotta milk those cult clicks, you know.
Certain topics, and Apple is certainly one of them, can be essentially guaranteed to generate a ton of traffic. HN is by no means immune. And some writers have made a career of taking advantage of that fact.
Meanwhile, a founder of one of the major 80s-era minicomputer companies that even had a book written about them passed away a few weeks ago and I would have not even known except for my Facebook groups.
Edson de Castro (Data General as in Soul of a New Machine). But you could name just about any luminary from important commercial computer companies from that era and it would be the same story. The computer industry just wasn't in the public spotlight at that time.
It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname. At some point if you sell your company, you are putting the surname of all your descendants in the hands of some other entity outside of your/their direct control.
>It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname.
That relationship can work in the opposite way sometimes. John McAfee seemed to be getting a gleeful kick out of embarrassing the security company that had invested in the right to use his name.
Usually because he was doing zany and sketchy and potentially criminal, while expertly courting media attention. But he also used that power for good sometimes by criticizing their bad products.
For anyone in the thread that's not seen "How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus" by John McAfee, you are very, very welcome [0].
Content warning: it was made in his Alpha-PHP era, and contains a lot of sex and drug references. It's mostly sex and drugs IIRC.
It's crazy how in our modern world people still might get offended because of something as common and natural as sex.
I don't think OP is offended, just, there's a lot of us who are in locations where we can't be watching someone yap about sex and drugs
>I’m pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes family is still perfectly OK with the association
The writers, editors and other business partners who built their reputation by contributing to Forbes previous good reputation are probably very not OK with it
The question was whether to name it after a person or not. Those people would be equally upset if it was named Bisclock, so them being upset at the current site is not relevant to the naming discussion.
For the amount of money involved, and all joking aside, you can have my first and last name. You can name a horrible flesh eating disease after me. It doesn't matter.
I get the feeling the family doesn't care while they lounge around on their stacks of cash?
Jardine is still a name in trading, at least in the west, not China, where they are not fondly remembered for their 19th-century "import activities".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jardine_Matheson_%2.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jardines_(company)
If they really care about it they can just change their name though.
Bit of a microcosm of the entire business world nowadays. Forbes made something - a magazine that produced enough good content to gain a reputation. In the new school of business, that's an asset, and assets are things we turn into cash as quickly as possible, so now Forbes sells CBD, and now anyone who sees "forbes.com" in the URL knows it's useless crap, but hey, someone made some money, and now they can go find the next thing to flip for a couple bucks.
I was talking to a friend about this recently.
I bought a pair of Doc Martens boots a while back. And they're shit. I remember them from the 80's and they were really solid, good leather, well made, etc. The modern ones are crappy leather and fell apart after only a few months. But they still cost a decent amount because they're Doc Martens.
My friend pointed out that Doc Martens are primarily worn by teenage girls these days, and are almost "fast fashion". My expectations based on the brand are not matching with reality, because the brand has moved on from being the de rigeur footwear for the entire 80's alternative scene.
From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The point being that Doc Martens, like Forbes, are trading in their reputation for quality. In ten years time they will be known as shitty boots that used to be worn by edgy teenage girls, and the brand will be worthless. But the shareholders will have made significant bank from the destruction of that brand. Late-stage capitalism win, I guess.
Sure but that seems to have been predictable from:
- 2003: DM came close to bankruptcy, moved all production from UK to China and Thailand, laid off UK workers
- 10/2013: private equity company Permira acquired R. Griggs Group Limited (owner of DM brand), for £300m. Hired former brand president of Vans as CEO.
- 2019: declining quality reported for previous years
- 1/2021: floated on London Stock Exchange for £3.7 billion.
9/20/2024: the stock is currently worth £51.65, market cap is £617m. That's 80% down from the IPO. Downward trend for last 3 years.
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/DOCS/dr-martens-pl... https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/docmf
> From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The problem is, it may be cash efficient in theory for an individual, but for society at large it's a significant cost - animal lives (for the leather), fossil fuel consumption (for the plastic parts and synthetic leather, also transport), human time lost in production and sales...
Its not late state capitalism. Its hidden inflation. The market for actual high quality boots is much smaller than you are thinking. Including your own desire. The reality is doc martins are selling for <$180 max, basically mid-high sneaker (non collectable) territory. Actual quality boots like the doc martins of the 80's probably cost over $1000 dollars now. Are you willing to pay over $1000 for boots? Because that is what quality boots cost now.
Doc martin didn't sacrifice the brand. They realized that people would never pay $1000 for doc martins so they just jettisoned the company name by rebranding into fast fashion before they totally disappear. It was probably the only choice by the time it was decided. There were probably some missteps along the way where they may have been able to keep their prices up enough to keep the quality but they missed it.
High quality boots definitely don't cost >$1000, and definitely not boots that are on par with the quality of DM from the 80s. DM from the 80s were "fine", but they still weren't really high quality and their soles were definitely not very durable.
Even today you can find excellent quality, resoleable boots, for $200-300. Just look at Redwing, Thursday, Wolverine and many, many others.
Certainly not. You can buy great boots for 250$. I bought my Salomon boots 5 years ago, I wear them a heck of a lot in the Canadian winter, and they're good as new. Much more comfortable than a Doc Martens boot, even in their prime, resolable with a Vibram Megagrip sole, has a carbon fiber backing plate that will never wear out, etc...
What happened is that technology advanced, and now good quality boots don't look like Docs anymore. The market for high quality, vintage construction boots is tiny, because people who only care about quality won't buy them anymore, which is why they are expensive : only a special kind of people who care a lot about quality and looks/nostalgia are going to buy them.
People who need high quality boots just won't be satisfied with heavy, fussy, non-breathable leather and rubber boots.
I think I paid $300AUD for mine. I was very poor in the 80's, I would not have been able to afford the equivalent of $1000USD. I have vague memories of them costing around 80 GBP, which would be ~350 GBP now, so about half that $1K (but definitely more than I paid for them now, so your point is at least partially true).
And yes, I would be willing to pay that kind of money now for a pair of boots that would last me a decade again.
It was also kinda the point back in the 80's; your Docs were an investment. They cost decent money, but they'd last a decade and became part of your identity. Practically a physical extension of your body; I had a flatmate who regularly fell asleep in his and eventually developed trenchfoot from doing that. The boots were fine, his feet weren't. Most of my friends back in the day had one pair of shoes; their Docs. It was worthwhile investing in them because that was all you needed.
I think you're also right that the brand itself has changed and moved down-market, so they're charging less than they used to for a lower-quality product. But this is kinda my point; the brand is now being cannibalised and turned into a low-quality fast-fashion product marketed with a high-quality brand. This is obviously not going to work long-term, as people realise that Docs are now shite. As I said, in ten year's time the brand won't be worth anything.
Although Docs have almost given up making in Northampton, you'll still find a number of shoemakers producing good quality boots that should last a decade or more. You'll be paying £250-£500 as you guessed.
It’s also late stage capitalism.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern management movement have caused worker pay to drop in real terms. Cut forward another decade or so and the entire retail landscape discovers people can no longer afford their products.
> Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern management movement have caused worker pay to drop in real terms.
This isn't well established as the cause and there is reason to expect that it isn't. To start with, the Housing Theory of Everything fits better.
If this was about management practices then in competitive markets things would still be fine, you would only need one company to not do that and everybody would buy from them. But things still kind of suck even there, so what's that about? Housing costs would explain it. People spend more money on rent so they have less money to spend on other things, meanwhile companies have to pay higher rents too, so their customers have less money and simultaneously their business has higher costs. Somehow they have to lower prices while covering higher costs and the somehow is by enshitifying their products, i.e. that is the symptom rather than the cause.
But the Housing Theory of Everything is slightly off, because the real problem is a generalization of the theory. Housing is expensive because supply is artificially constrained, and it's artificial supply constraints -- insufficiently competitive markets -- that are the general underlying cause. Housing is a major example of this, probably the largest and most important, both because it's such a large proportion of personal expenses and because the restrictive zoning that imposes the constraint is so widespread.
But it's the same problem when you need a medical imaging scan and there are Certificate of Need laws that expressly prohibit new competitors from providing the service when the incumbents are charging inflated prices, and then those high costs get incorporated into health insurance premiums and Medicare taxes and reduce real wages by increasing the cost of living.
Regulatory capture has to be undone or it will be our undoing.
Project Farm on youtube does a lot of comparison videos between a bunch of brands of the same type of tool. He's sometimes able to snag an antique craftsman (before Sears sold it to china) and includes it in his tests. It's always amazing how much better US made craftsman tools are compared to anything currently made in china (including the current version of craftsman).
I think that the trick is to try to find new and upcoming brands that have a reputation for quality, and learn what high quality looks like so that you can confirm personally that the product is good.
This is difficult and requires ongoing work. Fashionable young people tend to do it but I certainly don’t blame anyone who decides that it isn’t worth the effort.
This used to be what brand was all about - that you could trust the brand to produce high-quality stuff because it was a quality brand. All Doc Marten boots were well-made and solid, would last a decade at least, because it was a quality brand and the price tag came with that.
I know what high quality looks like; I wore my first Doc Martens for a decade. I trusted the brand when revisiting my youth and buying a new pair.
It seems someone figured out that the price tag goes with the brand, not the quality. So you can charge high prices for cheap boots if you put the DM tag on them. And make bank.
I think this will accelerate, and the "new and upcoming" brands will get shit at exactly the point where people like me discover them. Because, as you say, it's not worth the effort to keep up with this rapid churn.
Hence the Inverse Vimes solution: stop trying to buy quality and instead accept that everything is shit and deal with that reality; buy cheap and often.
fortune.com too. same thing . these brands realized they can cash in on their domain authority to create content farms full of ads. scales really well too
Fortune's case was mostly the whole Time-Life magazine empire going to the dogs partly by way of TWB. Forbes just kind of faded away post-Malcolm (and with a distracted Steven Forbes).
But, in general, the magazine and journalism businesses aren't what they were so most of the relatively mass market magazines pretty much cashed in on their brands to the degree their owners decided to keep them around.
Well what did you expect them to do? Magazine subscriptions fell off a cliff as the Internet matured and no one wants to pay for online content.
I noticed recently actually seeing "Consumer Reports Best Buy" listed in ad copy for some products.
For decades they were extremely assertive about not licensing that sort of stuff out, to the point where advertisers used to say "A leading consumer magazine" if they wanted to hint about that.
I don't understand you, the term "Consumer Reports Best Buy" has been in use since at least 2004, which implies CR permitted the term to be used.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
Not to become villains and scammers, obviously. That's the bare minimum of what you should not become no matter how bad your business is going.
Maximizing engagement is antithetical to rational discourse.
Apropos of nothing: NYT's subscriptions transistioned from ~0.5m print to 10m digital. (More or less.)
One of the Forbes "contributors", Gordon Kelly, used to generate an enormous volume of posts for every single minor Apple software release, in addition to regurgitating every rumor published by Mark Gurman and other journalists.
Apparently he passed away last year, after "authoring 2,511 articles in sum and accumulating over 174 million page views in just one year, 33 million of which were gained within a single month."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2023/10/05/tribute...