As a business owner myself, I welcome feedback and get the most out of the suggestions for improvement as do the vast majority of successful business owners. From what I've seen here Baron is a pretty damn good at running this business and more than happy to take honest and sincere feedback of any kind. I would maintain that you're doing him a disfavor when you tell users of ET that it's bad manners to provide feedback. Especially so when ET is a user content driven site. Sorry, but that's just horrible business advice.
Maybe he just did it as another business decision to give the illusion for whiners such as yourself that their useless opinions were being taken into consideration... Companies do that all the time, even though they, like Baron or any businessman will never admit doing it, since it is not in their interest to do so. The only feedback that a businessman needs is his P&L, nothing else matters. This is and should be the only thing that makes anyone take action. Who said so?
I'm sure this is right. For my first few months here, I was stupid enough to imagine almost the opposite, but have gradually and increasingly been realizing how mistaken I was about that, more recently. My instinctive assumption, now, when something seems to be terribly "wrong", is that Baron knows about it, knows what he's doing, and that there's usually a reason for it, of which I'm just unaware.
Wow...that's big news to me. That's giving sponsors moderator characteristics in their own threads. This was something many years ago that ET management specifically stated to someone such was "not true" here in the feedback section. If such in fact was not true many years ago...that would imply that Baron has made a change for such to now be true today. wrbtrader
. I just found out that a sponsor has a limited amount of time to delete his thread. After that he needs to ask for support to do so.
Given that you've clearly never run a business and think it's rude to provide feedback, you seem to be pretty damn sure of yourself when it comes to deciding the best way to run a business! Let me break it down for you, again based on some firsthand experience that you may lack. P&L is a lagging indicator. If you actually start to lose money it means your customer already left. Once a customer leaves, it's far harder to get them back than to acquire them initially. So if you wait until they're gone it's too late. To ignore the chance to make minor changes that would keep that customer before they leave, especially when it's so easy, is just idiotic. And that only covers keeping your existing customers, not winning new ones. Again, ignoring your customer's ideas for what would make your product or platform better is just rank stupidity. Especially a business like ET where the customers generate your content. I'd suggest that while you may be really good at some things, running a business isn't going to be one of them. There is always a spot for you working for Interactive Brokers though!
You assume too much... You have no idea who I am or what I do. There's no sense in constructing an idea over something that you don't know or a simple assumption, so you're wrong from the start. You missed a crucial point here(among others): the client is the one that pays for the service. So, the users are not Baron's clients, the sponsors are. As in trading and everything in life, if one bases his business decisions on the opinions of others, he is destined to failure. That is pure logic: others have nothing to lose by giving opinions, the owner stands to lose everything. So the only opinion that matters is the opinion of the one who really puts it on the line. As I already made it clear, I don't give a shit about your(or anyone else's) suggestion.
I can actually say with almost absolute certainty based on your comments that you've never run a profitable real business (lemonade stands don't count), and certainly never one where users generate the content that is the only reason for your business's existence. In fact, I'll be willing to put a substantial sum of money on it. Care to put your money where your mouth is, or are you just going to whine about people making true observations about you based on the drivel coming out of your keyboard?
Hmmm..I think most MBA programs wholeheartedly attribute that mindset to the creation of the Pinto and the Vega. Two of Motown's gems.