If you can share, what was the dishonesty you're writing about? I can't tell if you're saying it was fraudulent dishonesty or self-delusion (where you think you're in a better position than you really are).
And do you know if the self-sever market was drying up for Optimizely in 2015? I assume they wouldn't abandon it if it was growing at a decent rate.
In my experience, I agree the core functionality (variant management, remote config, etc.) is relatively small amount of effort compared to the interfaces to make it accessible to those non-technical orgs, like you mention.
However, we found that those interfaces only allow very limited, shallow tests and you very quickly outgrow them as an organization. In other words, once you reach diminishing returns on button color and header text optimizations, you start wanting to test deeper UI experiences and complicated user flows. At that point, you have to involve engineering anyway.
When an organization has engineers who are motivated by business metrics, they have no problem implementing shallow tests (like button colors) while working on tests of the deeper UI experiences as well. And at that point, the non-technical interfaces have little value.
They used to, but they ended it a few years ago. They consciously moved higher market, higher touch, higher cost.
Ultimately, i believe they got squeezed between smaller companies using free or cheaper offerings and larger companies probably building it themselves.
A few years ago, we were a monthly customer of Optimizely for a few hundred dollars a month. Reasonable for a startup.
Then they went to the annual cost of $30K+ upfront and ended all monthly options. They had to move to high cost, high touch to compete with the free/cheap offerings to stay in business. This acquisition suggests that didn't work.
We ended up building randomization, remote config, and logging ourselves, and did the analysis with our existing stuff.
The publisher Metropolitan Books looks like it's part of Macmillan so they're likely a traditional publisher, which suggests he got a pretty healthy advance on the book because of his fame.
I would also guess that even if he sold enough books to earn out the advance, his take on each incremental book is really small as the publisher took most of the financial risk with the advance itself.
Sometimes, my kids will say they're bored. My response to them is that my job is not to entertain them. They totally get it, though sometimes they're still bored...
When I was a kid, I used to just watch TV and wait for friends to come at home to play.
In one particular afternoon, there was nothing good showing on TV and my friends are away. I complained to my mom that I was bored(implying that she should solve this "problem" for me).
My mom basically said just what you posted above. That it was my responsibility to find my own fun.
That was an epiphany that had a tremendous impact in my life.
And that's okay. You're job isn't to be their friend either.
A parent's job is to give their kids opportunity to learn and grow. You can't always force it on them, and they won't always be interested.
You can give them them the opportunity to do something that will help them grow (learn, build character, etc) or they can be bored, but if they choose to be bored, they need to be told that they have options, and they are the ones choosing to be bored.
And the opportunities you give them don't always have to be something that costs you time or money, sometimes it's just giving them the opportunity to go outside and play.
Because that would solve that particular situation, but wouldn't be good for the kid overall. Situations like these are where kids learn introspection (what is it I actually would like to do now?) and emotional autonomy (I can create a good experience by myself), resulting in the idea of self-efficacy, which, beside the cognitive abilities, is the skill to have to successfully navigate the stressfull and anxious situations of adult life.
Think about you adult life: When are the moments you have some kind of epiphany about something that currently bothers you? For many people this happens when out for a walk, under the shower or a similar situation when the own mind is free to wander.
Cognitive development is important, but school, discourse with parents etc. is usually enough for the healthy development of most kids. For a successful life as an adult, the emotional development is just as important, though.
My daughter invented one version with regenerating pawns. I play regular chess on my side, and on her side, she has the king, queen, and 8 pawns. On her turn, she can choose to move a piece as normal or put a pawn on any square on her half, but only if she's had a pawn captured (so off the board).
It creates a strange desire for her to get her pawns captured so she can plop it down somewhere else, and a strange desire for me not to capture any pawns.
This seems like a great area for disruption. You can imagine a property manager for a homeowner who you call for anything. They can charge a monthly fee plus a percentage on top of any (vetted) subs they use. A single person can probably juggle dozens to hundreds of homes; then scale that.
It's the services of a rental property manager without the rental part.
With adults these days (me included) being more technically savvy but less... handy, it seems perfect.
Such things exist. I hear ads for them on the radio. They pitch themselves as "maintenance insurance" or some such, but I think it would do what you're asking.
As someone who has been through the pain of using a home warranty I highly recommend against it. When we had one we found one of 2 things always happened:
1. Whatever broke wasn't covered by the warranty. For example on a fridge, the most common component to break is the compressor, and that's not covered by a home warranty because it costs just slightly less than the cost of a refrigerator to repair.
2. The warranty company gets to choose who fixes your problem and they choose the lowest bidder, which is almost always a person who doesn't have better work to do because they aren't very good. Every single time I've used a home warranty, I had to have someone come back and re-do the work because it was so shoddy.
YMMV, but I've heard similar stories from others who have used them. I now consider a home warranty to be a negative rather than a positive because I've had to pay another person to come in and fix something correctly that was done improperly by a home warranty repair person.
And do you know if the self-sever market was drying up for Optimizely in 2015? I assume they wouldn't abandon it if it was growing at a decent rate.