Isn't this a perfect case for why SAAS stocks have been puking all year?
I certainly don't think Zendesk's core business is threatened here, and I have no desire to replace Zendesk with a custom solution. But Zendesk's ability to upcharge, sell adjacent products, and pass on cost increases is hugely threatened. If PE was planning on a decade of consistent cost increases and more land, that dream seems materially threatened!
Sure, in the case of private equity rollups in HVAC and electric and plumbing you often get higher rates but professionalized systems including real contracts, phone answering, emailed invoices, real quotes, real terms, enforceable warranties. Many who have trusted vendors may view this as degradation because of the cost increase but for others (a new homeowner with a job), the professionalization is a positive.
For software like Zendesk that was already thoroughly professionalized, I agree, it's hard to think of positive attributes to a PE buyout!
When the IT department is also the developer of the software, instructors will demand their feature be included in the software: they need a gradebook column that counts as extra credit, missing work, a dropped score, and 40% of the final grade simultaneously, but only for students who email after midnight during finals week.
IT department will then build the feature as instructors are high-status and IT is low-status, and they aim to please. The software will collect hundreds of these over time. The institution will accumulate more developers, QA, a11y testers, PMs, instructional design consultants, and more PMs to deal with the instructors. The institution will then move to SAAS solution where the instructor is forced to join Canvas Jira and submit their feature request. A product manager at Canvas will then post to Jira and say thanks for your feature request, we will consider it. Game over.
Europe will financialize everything just slower and with more regulation. Branded credit cards are coming. See Brussels Airlines and Mastercard
A well optimized domestic USA airline makes money from credit cards, points, trip insurance, upsells, and segments the consumer into a dozen bins based on what they’re willing to spend for a couple more inches of leg room.
Not sure about your bit of Europe but I’ve had branded credit cards from European airlines here in Europe for a long time. They’re definitely past ‘coming’.
Not as lucrative for me the holder as you’d get it the US, but I can’t really imagine being without one.
As I recall, that's because it's basically impossible to have a US rewards card in Europe. European authorities tightly cap interchange fees (the fees that come out of the merchant's end of the deal).
US issuers are much less regulated. In the US there are cheap cards that offer no perks and take a small (0.2-1%) cut from the merchant, and the perks cards that have lots of perks and take a bigger (3.5%) cut from the merchant. The CC companies, naturally, want more people to use perks cards so they get more of a cut, so to encourage consumers to use these cards they give some of it back to the users in the form of these rewards.
This model recently came under attack when a whole bunch of merchants brought an anti-trust lawsuit against Visa and MC for their requirement that if you wanted to accept the cheap cards you had to accept the expensive cards as well, merchants want to be able to accept the cheap cards and reject the higher tier cards. The negotiations about that settlement continue, so we'll have to see how it all shakes out, but it could result in a major limiting of American reward cards. Or maybe not, always in motion the future is.
The EU parliament passed a law capping interchange fees at 0.3% (for local personal cards, business has some other limit that I don't remember) so there is just no money to offer rewards to customers of European banks. Much better for merchants, lower prices overall mean probably better for poorer folks, worse deal for wealthy people with good credit who pay attention and pay their bills in full every month. Speaking as an American one of those people who benefit from rewards cards, I think that it is better for society to go with the European choices than the American.
What is the simple explanation for the terrible support by Firefox and Safari? I figured this was relatively low-hanging fruit, widely used, a big boost for performance (date pickers often load 100s of locales and translations), and a giant move towards sanity for web app developers.
It's simply not a priority. The Bugzilla has been open for 9 years. At one point the assignee of the bug simply stopped logging in and it took 7 months for the autonag to bother people. There simply aren't enough people asking for it. And the fact that it's a Chrome-exclusive feature means it's gonna take a backseat to features that Chrome AND Safari implement but are lacking in Firefox.
There actually was some massive progress on it 3 months ago and it looks like they just need testing now but, again, it's just not a big priority
> a big boost for performance (date pickers often load 100s of locales and translations)
The native date/time pickers work great across all 3 major browsers in my experience. The use-cases for type="week" and type="month" are simply a lot less common.
This is very sensible. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any states incentivizing demand. I suppose you could argue that license fees have not gone up at the CPI rate, so this is a discount of sorts. There are small attempts at encouraging kids to signup, but it's surprising how little dynamic control (doe tags, lotteries, etc) there is especially as most states have made the license process fully electronic.
I would love to hear from a Vanguard employee on their tech challenges, e.g., why is the client web interface significantly worse than competitors? Or is it purposeful? E.g., slow down, trade less?!
I actually like their revamp a lot (last few years?). They have a million subdomains they send you around which is weird, but I don't mind the current UI. Sometimes they still send you to an old page though, like for scheduled investments (if I recall). What are the parts that irk you, out of curiousity?
I think Fidelity's Net Benefits (which I believe is distinct from the personal site) is pretty bad though.
I HATE the new web interface. It's significantly slower, shows less useful information, and has many more times where it just doesn't work as compared to the old web interface. If there was an option to go back to using the old web interface fully, I would sign up for that immediately.
For an example of a thing I hate about the new web interface is trying to buy a stock. You end up in some different part of the website where after you place your order it shows you a differently formatted order status page than the normal order status page. There's an Exit button at the top. Pressing the Exit button will pop up asking if you want to leave because you'll lose all your unplaced orders, of which you have none because how you got to the Order Status page was by fully placing an order. It's confusing for no reason.
Vanguard is really good at listening to feedback and using that to inform fixes to the various web and mobile applications. So if you're using the UI and see a survey, you should absolutely submit this feedback. They listen to it, and effect that change quite quickly on modernized pages.
Agree with all you've noted. I'd also add that 'Exit'/'Close' buttons sometimes don't work (I use Firefox btw). Worse, you have to click so many different buttons to buy just one index fund.
In contrast, I can do all that in one pop-up/side panel in Fidelity or Charles Schwab. I have been a long time user of Vanguard (almost two decades) and I wish they revert to their old web UI, which is informative and simple enough to get all the jobs I need to do in an efficient manner.
Oh interesting. I guess I only follow the fund purchase flow on the website once and a while and everything else is automated, so I don't end up using the site as much. Probably makes me a not-so-great testimonial in hindsight.
Most of my Vanguard investments are in a very small number of IRA mutual funds which have automatic monthly deposits configured, but even just for the few trades I do with fun money each month the current web UI grates on me. I know it can be better, Vanguard used to be good at this.
Not the OP, but besides the subdomains, it feels like each section/UI/subdomain was designed by a different team. The overall interface doesn't feel cohesive (to me).
In my experience, every brokerage UI is dripping with tech debt. You can see all of the layers of paint put on over the years on top of some old ass legacy system underneath it all. You click around enough and find 2000s UI elements still in most of them.
There has been an immense push to modernize the Vanguard site and the underlying architecture. This has been an enormous effort over multiple years. Since Vanguard was always a "no-branches" company, it's always been web-based. So, as a result, much of the site was built at the "bleeding edge of the time" but they are now in a position where that needs to be fully modernized.
Vanguard's architecture is enormous, but they are getting closer and closer to fully modernizing the site and retiring legacy completely. Its something that has been happening and will continue to happen over the next few years.
Not an employee, but the reason I ended up not using them is because when I went to sign up, due to having a 401K account with them via a previous employer, I had to call their customer hotline, and their customer representative wanted alot of sensitive information over the phone - including giving them a password for my account.
I refuse to do business with a company with that shoddy of security practices. There's no reason what the representative was doing couldn't have been done online through a secure portal that respects my privacy, but alas, it could not.
I went with Fidelity. Its been great. Though all these brokerages have their pros and cons, I groked the setup at Fidelity pretty fast.
Do you think the custom-build approach predominant in the U.S. (where engines are designed to specific local needs) is a key factor behind the steep price hikes and lengthy lead times, as opposed to the more standardized, off-the-shelf models that seem common in Europe? Do you support the custom-build approach?
Consolidation leading to long lead times sounds like an efficiency / queuing theory thing. The closer capacity gets to demand, the longer it takes for any slight bumps to work their way out of the backlog.
is a key factor behind the steep price hikes and lengthy lead times
I'm not sure I have an opinion on that. Again, I've been away from the fire service for a long time, and there's a lot of issues that I'm probably not fully up-to-date on.
Do you support the custom-build approach?
I have mixed feelings on that, and always have. On the one hand, I do believe that local needs vary a lot from place to place. For example, a rural farming community in Iowa probably genuinely needs things different from, say, San Francisco. But does each department really need to specify every little detail of how their truck is configured? I'm a big proponent of standardization and I sometimes think that people spec'ing fire trucks get too caught in believing "our case is special" when maybe it's not that special after all. So... uh, yeah. I hate to waffle, but it's hard to say for sure.
Judging by this article, in a country with fairly standard vehicles the lead time is at least 6 months. The price is lower though, £350,000. I saw recent prices from £250-650k while searching, depending what was purchased.
I certainly don't think Zendesk's core business is threatened here, and I have no desire to replace Zendesk with a custom solution. But Zendesk's ability to upcharge, sell adjacent products, and pass on cost increases is hugely threatened. If PE was planning on a decade of consistent cost increases and more land, that dream seems materially threatened!
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