I've worked at a few such companies, and they all work extra hard trying to diversify their revenue sources, for both customers and industry. If it's a startup, then such revenue dependence can mean the difference between being able to go IPO or not.

For the situation you describe for restaurants, they'd have to be vigilant about catering to multiple platform providers, and not neglecting their in-person customers (I've definitely seen a restaurant cater more to delivery rather than sit down, and slowly deteriorating in reputation among customers as order times became longer).

It's just like managing an AAPL supplier contract. Some will thrive, and others will suffer, like the sapphire supplier in Arizona.

http://www.businessinsider.com/gt-advanced-files-for-bankrup...

At some point the corporation decided it wouldn't outsource software development work anymore. They hired some of the key people at my former employer (by then I had already moved somewhere else), and almost overnight they had to close shop because they didn't have a source of revenue anymore.

Wise agencies try to diversify - but any new business brought in will have to deal with The Big Client being the squeakiest of wheels (... that get the grease).

I can't say I've see an agency that has made the "grow other business" transition successfully.

All you can do is hope that you can nail down the next large customer before your existing golden egg figures out they can push you around.

I've often wondered how well a restaurant would do in areas where those platforms are popular if it just dropped its customer-facing storefront entirely and went entirely online delivery.

The drop in operating costs versus the lack of walk-ins ...

I expect you'll see more non-traditional kitchen locations and alternative delivery transport methods (e.g. scooters or Postmates bike couriers) to combat the high rents, congestion and parking issues common to most dense cities.

I can only imagine what would have happened if he didn't post to a website where it gained traction. If it wasn't upvoted out of reddit's new, would he just be completely screwed? Damn...

Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media.

We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:

https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...

A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online.

Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.

That's an awful example. The employee completely stopped responding after that so we don't know how much of the truth it was (like you said there are two sides and there were tons of rumors he was advised by his lawyer to stop talking; who knows what happened after that).

What's worse is this type of behavior by the CEO was downright despicable. Why? Two scenarios.

1. The employee was correct and it showed other employees that the CEO is willing to lie and berate them in the open public should they have a dissenting, public opinion about the company. Feedback, even if encourages, would completely stop after this event.

2. The employee was a liar and really was terrible. The CEO now has created a permanent remark that cannot be taken back regarding this person's work ethic. Now the employee can't redeem themselves. They can't learn from past mistakes. Every employer in the future of his employment can google search him and have this come up. Unfortunately this is likely to come up more and more as kids grow up with Facebook, post photos of themselves being drunk or otherwise and then seeking employment as they grow up.

Both sides were awful in this example.

If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.

> One user reported that an account that hadn’t been used to purchase a Pixel was suspended, apparently because it was listed as a back-up address for an account that had.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...

I can't imagine they ban IP addresses lightly.

Sign up for all of the services: OpenTable, Doordash, Amazon Restaurants, GrubHub, Postmates, everything. That way, when one service does something terrible, you aren't crippled by the single point of failure, and as long as it wasn't terrible enough to sever the relationship, you can take your time rectifying the issue.

I've worked with seven different resorts/hotels doing web-dev and every single one of them absolutely hated TripAdvisor and wished it didn't exist and they didn't have to be on it to survive.

Now, I don't really care that it's google, but they are the biggest and most likely to be seen. Preferably Bing and Yahoo and DDG would have an equivalent.

A funded startup on the other hand could go under at moment when their next round of funding doesn't come in. It's also a sure bet that any success you're seeing from them early on will diminish over as they attempt to actually make a profit.

Amazon here is a me-too play here, and I'd be shocked if they reached the concentration to sink a restaurant given so many incumbents.

Search discovery: Google, Bing

Social promotion: FB, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc

App & software stores: Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Steam

General commerce: Transaction networks, Paypal, banks, etc

Online commerce: eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Craigslist, Zillow, Priceline, Airbnb, Alibaba, hundreds more

There's nothing new about this. All businesses utilize platforms they don't control. There are no exceptions.

Radio, TV, newspapers, mail catalogs were discovery and promotion before Google search was. The dependency was just as high.

Want to open a hotdog stand or a gas station? The absolute minimum platform you'll be dependent on will be local political system/s in dozens of ways (infrastructure, zoning, health laws, employment regulations, and on and on).

1. This is a metaphor, in case anyone else is feeling pedantic and wants to challenge the notion that eggs are commonly transported in baskets...

This is a valuable service to the consumer and good restaurants will thrive while bad ones will fail.

Also, any halfway decent owner/marketer knows you need to capture email addresses for people you want to sell to. Never rely on social media alone. Just use it to get them to give you an email.

The problem is that Amazon often doesn't seem to really investigate issues in any depth at all; they just kick the seller off reflexively. It's trivially easy to be kicked off the platform for reasons other than doing something legitimately "bad," such as software error, human error, or even a deliberately orchestrated fraud campaign conducted by your competitor -- and many other sellers don't get kicked off for doing the same thing, or worse. It's all very random.

Transparency has nothing to do with it.

Amazon has a history of shutting down Fulfillment By Amazon seller accounts in an extremely arbitrary and capricious manner.

If they only shut them down due to legitimate complaints then sure, you might have a point. The story I linked proved that's not the case, and there are many more like it. That man's life would still be in ruins if he hadn't (luckily) gotten so much attention through Reddit and HN.

That's really only on the West Coast. People don't live or die by Yelp here on the East Coast. Frankly, I'm always surprised to see people are still using it after all the revelations of extortionist behavior they were engaging in against restaurants.

Yes, because people are poor at dealing with selection bias. A data source with 100% real and true complaints and favorable reviews can tell any story you want it to with the right filtering, so especially in the presence of a malicious adversary you have to completely discard this data from your decision making.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237102

That's a false premise, which assumes any and all complaints are made in good faith. Some people are assholes and will leave a bad review because they disliked the person who delivered a meal or any number of other spurious reasons. You really sound like the sort of person who has never worked in any other field than IT and has a naive and largely illusory view of business conditions.

EDIT: Oh, and speaking of Amazon, Google and their automated bans, my SO's company's work account got temporarily blocked by Google recently, apparently for the sin of sending several files in quick succession to her boss' account. Apparently "atypical usage" is grounds for a ban now. Fortunately, the account was unlocked few hours later, and I didn't have to make fuss about it here on HN...

For an interesting view of where this has happened before, look no further than FB subsuming publishers via Instant Articles and Google recently doing the same with Amp. They stole all the control of the audience data from publishers, and give out whatever cut they feel is appropriate from ad revenue. Publishers refused to adapt or couldn't adapt fast enough and are royally screwed as a result.

Speaking of them, I think we're overdue for the next cycle of them killing off API access...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10427530