WTF happened to Supercool App Decide.com?

general topics
1

Decide.com used to, in concept at least, give great advice on when to buy stuff - ipads etc - and at what price. It summarised all the googleable information about upcoming development releases into simple, obvious terms for the laypeople - like ‘only buy this one now at $100 less than advertised since in 2 weeks there’s a new one coming with a major chip upgrade that will, like, make this one suck’.

Utter nightmare for hawkers of goods - had the entire world used decide.com, you’d have to charge pennies to clear out old generation gear.

Seemed to me, live albeit constantly developing, to be a major tool to help drive the New Economy. Informed people making informed purchase decisions. Really, truly monkeying around with the accepted structures of supply and consumption, right down at the root.

Now it’s gone! (OK, I hadn’t checked in for a while, but started looking at upgrading my ipad mk1).

They sold to ebay.com - and say this:

Over the past year, we began experimenting with eBay and discovered an exciting
opportunity to apply our team’s strength in data and predictive analytics to
help over 25 million eBay sellers make smarter decisions and be more
successful.

They’ve stopped giving buying advice, it seems.

I get that after a while, with sufficient mass, you’d become such a pain to vendors they would come after you, and I get that the same methods for canny buying can be reverse-engineered for canny selling - but where is my clever buying app???

It had a long way to go, and a seemingly limitless horizon. It could have been truly amazing - and should be re-made by someone else!

What other facilitating stuff will disappear?

2

Pitiful Consumer! Your algorithms cannot help you now! MWUHAHAHAHAAAAA!

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3

That’s it right?! Back in the dotcom boom v1.0, I was sure services like ant.com - coalescing groups of individual buyers who wanted the same thing - would take off, but they were snuffed out somehow as well.

4

If you weren’t paying for it, don’t count on it lasting. Either it’ll get bought out by someone who wants to use it, or by someone who wants to shut it down, or by someone who wants it to start paying for itself, or some combination of the above… or the folks running it will find a paying job and/or Get A Life and abandon it.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Or find a way to help it last. Or take its death as an opportunity to spend your own money and time on reinventing it…

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5

This kind of thing could be an ever-dipping pot of gold! Better plan: set up a secret society that for millennia and beyond would do exactly as you say: generationally re-invent lost ideas, build the market, then sell for Bullionz. Stash the cash in the sacred place and hand the baton on.

No one need ever know.

6

Actually Decide.com did go subscription - and refunded the unused fees. Ebay did not want the tech to self-propagate!

But the concept is simple enough, and could easily be done again. Just a question of minimising the manpower behind the data - that’s the golden key.

7

My coding skills are terrible. It’d be more efficient for me to just scour the net for the cheapest ipad.

1 Like
8

macrumors.com has a nice section on it.

Though I tell you one awful truth - I’ve been “planning” (in that pipe in the mouth, 1,000 yard gaze, relaxed be-corduroy’d legs easily crossed way) on buying an iMac for the work side of my life, and every time I remember to think about it, these services have put me off!

“Wait!” they say - “there’s a newer cheaper CPU on its way - just a matter of time!”

So over the long term, I’ve saved a lot of money (don’t have an iMac!) and hassle of switching gear.

Still have to bargain with the Mrs for tele time, but I feel neutrally winning over the long term.

So these things both reduce cost to the consumer, but also risk dampening purchase enthusiasm. Were I a seller of goods, I’d be keen to see it disappear!

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