> big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever
I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of network effects. You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it.
In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope that everything will just magically get better now that your local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf software seems slightly optimistic.
> In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all
They're incredibly useful to the state as large monolithic entities. It's much easier to spy on people and exert influence. Imagine the feds chasing dozens of social media platforms to fight election interference.
There is no chance any legislative body will break up tech. They'll more likely go the bank route and make them too big to fail, and regulate them, which amounts to giving the government direct or indirect power in what speech is allowed on the platform.
Facebook stays big because nobody else seems to have the magic combination of (1) a more compelling product vision for a social network, (2) capacity to execute and scale that vision.
Come on, can't anyone make a product that connects friends better than FB? I'm sure it's technically amazing, but from a product perspective, my god, look at the thing, it's an absolute garbage fire. You can tell from the notifications it sends that it wants you to watch shitty videos and read shitty news articles alone, not connect you with your friends.
Make a social network that feels like an actual social space and not an ad-infested media shithole, and I'll sign up, my friends will sign up, everyone will sign up, and FB will be toast in a couple months.
Yes, there's a strong case for Facebook. But consider Skype: it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom. Facebook's strength isn't just a network, it also has a lot of people's recorded history. So, the power of network effects varies. I think if e.g. Signal came up with features that Whatsapp lacks, it would have a good chance to displace Whatsapp.
>Facebook ... stays big primarily because of network effects
And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them doing that.
I personally think web 3.0 is overhyped and almost anything involving NFTs are basically ponzi schemes. But the premise is decentralizing the web, which if it even partially delivers could in theory chip away a lot of most tech giants. Combined with regulation things could change.
A lot of these things run on sentiment . About 15 years ago the supposedly smartest people and greed was on Wall Street . Talking derivatives and investment banking was where all my college friends with the best grades went .They were the bad ones and we were the cool good ones.
Fast forward to today and big tech is where those same college friends are now, the greed is still there , the gentrification of the west coast and a whole host of things means we are the bad guys now.
Enter the FTC and new anti- trust and anti- monopoly laws. It’s been a great ride for the last decade but I agree that big tech needs to be reined in .
Antitrust won't end big tech. It will just kneecap the US and Europe.
They will take the only part of the new economy they have a foothold in and hand it to someone else.
China's tech companies, supported and subsidized by the government, will take over.
This is blindingly obvious.
The thing that is amusing is that US/Europe seem to think they will be able to deal with this and effectively regulate them, despite not succeeding at this at all in the past (see China + IP, etc).
One major reason is that China is willing to play "unfairly" to support its companies.
US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much.
They will attempt what they do now, which is to regulate them in various ways to "ensure competition"
But when you go to do that to a chinese company, the government will find a way to make it hurt for you. You make it hurt for Chinese Search Engine Company, they will ban the chip companies from making chips for you, etc.
They are much better at this game than the other governments.
> You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it.
Much easier said than done. FB is a massive product, I don't think anyone can realistically predict how something that really had all the features of FB would actually fare. Beyond that, we know that new networks are created all the time despite the existence of other big ones. Based on your premise, tiktok shouldn't have existed, nor insta, nor snapchat. Network effects matter but if the product actually does something useful or better and is well designed, people will come.
The best thing that regulators can do is to enforce common protocols. The only things that have survived becoming a walled garden by big tech are big protocols that existed before them (e.g. email)
facebook also caught the social internet first wave.. humanity never had a global website to 'exist' .. facebook came, everybody thought it would be teh future and wanted to try.
Remembe Fuller's quote "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete"
Big tech is the existing reality and it can only be changed by making it obsolete. The digital technology for doing so is actually available (or can be refined rapidly). What is not available is the social technology: the attitude of governments and regulators, solid, honest-to-goodness business models, the education of the populace etc
I fully expect our next cycle to be one of de-platforming, with this quote in support.
Decentralized technology is rife with fraud and noise, but ENS is an exemplary preview of a Web3 future. Like SSO without a middleman. It's a far superior user experience (no password requirements, email verification, data leaks), and allows developers to bypass account management altogether when building a webapp. To me, it's glaringly obvious this is one of the most significant milestones in our transition to a better web.
I agree with the article’s thought about phase where “everyone understands the magic”, and I agree with your point about making reality obsolete. Problem is, Big Tech amasses great amount of resources to survive this event and delay own demise.
Good luck competing when your innovation can be copied by tech giant in a matter of months, your price tag could be beaten overnight with dumping, and your business could be bought out to suffocate in the basements of Alphabet.
Fortunately, our society both understands the dangers of monopolies, and has tools (regulations) to balance them out. Could anti-monopoly lawsuits happen that would force break big tech? That has happened in the past, see Bell System[1]
Implementing centralized application rules on completely decentralized compute/networking foundations is now a thing.
Let's say you want to build something like Mars Coin. It's gotta work reliably at the scale of billions of nodes, separated by minutes of transit time, at billions of aggregate transactions per second, at a cost below micro-cents per transaction. Without the possibility of being shut down by a government-scale bad actor.
> Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square.
Are Shopify, Stripe, and Square not big tech? Maybe medium-big instead of mega-big?
Look at what areas they demonize as "big tech" and why. It isn't a matter of harm - cable carriers and ISPs get treated with kid gloves. It is media which they see as competing with them. The three Ses they don't know or care about.
Shopify is Canada’s biggest company. A top 10 GDP country. All three are worth $100B+. I’d think they and PayPal are all close enough to big tech. Though as you say they aren’t mega big.
Big tech is big because we are globalising - because an app / website written in one country can be used in dozens of others, 192 if your i18n-fu is good enough.
Scale is something we have not really taken on board as we head to 10 billion humans. And when we look critically at the Big in big tech now, they are really bit-players with leverage. News aggregators, search engines, publishing platforms. The traditional "media" have had outside influence and this new globalised generation has that, but compared to what's likely to come it's nothing.
Global pharma, energy, transportation, new manufacturing, supply chain observability, consumer friendly finance. These things and more will have huge impacts - and all will have software at their hearts.
If that (software) is what we mean by Tech, then yeah, Google is a minnow to come.
But there is hope. Software (and observability) are incredibly amenable to democracy and independent monitoring, to smart regulation and smart outcomes.
It's a political challenge to manage the wealth to come - but look at how the USA handled the robber barons. It took massive system wide political change if it happened.
Globalizing democracy means that increasingly , half of the population of the earth will be oppressed by the other half. At least the division of nations leaves people with the option to leave one democracy and go live in another that fits them better. We can't leave earth for something else yet. Global democracy controlled by global media is a bad outcome.
Globalization overshot. It was mostly artificially propped up with the global fiat monetary system. Now that the fiat monetary system is running out of steam and heading into high inflation territory, we will revert back to a more localized world which most people will be happier in.
Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.
We're just now noticing the edge of the cliff rapidly passing eye level as we fall. Every time tech gets easier, its users get more ignorant. Microsoft can take a shit in our mouths with Windows 11 because the average Windows 11 user doesn't even know what an operating system is, let alone that they can change to a different one. Facebook and YouTube can do whatever they want because their only competitors are even more toxic than they are.
Who do you think could make big tech fall? The politicians who think it's perfect the way it is or the ones who think it needs to be much worse?
Big tech started with expertise but moved to rent seeking. Amazon is not in ecommerce but in a seller market place. google/facebooks are in ads, etc.
The problem is not that you coffee store can do ecommerce, but that nobody can find your coffee store if it is not in amazon, or does not buy ads from google/facebook.
I don't think traditional companies will subsume technology as the article claims - big companies tend to innovate by acquisition, and VERY FEW companies are actually good at producing software at scale. I don't think we've reached phase 3 in the article yet - very few companies have figured out the "magic" of software, hardware, large scale data mining, hosting, etc.
I also don't think tech will have long lasting monopolies, unless government regulation makes it so. Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? All of these were dominant at one point.
I do expect a shift in investor mindset - right now tech companies are not held to the same profitability standards, so the tech stocks are very expensive for even wildly optimistic projections of future growth. It's as if the market is already pricing in a future monopoly for these companies. Given how fragile tech monopolies tend to be, I expect a correction at some point (not a good short though - no way to predict the timing)
"Why work on a cool app or faster database, if Google or Facebook will copy your idea and sell it at scale?"
Because if you've worked at these companies, you know you can spin circles around them in execution speed alone. Not to mention way too many things are too small scale for them to even pay attention to.
And if your successful, they would rather buy you most of the time than make a competitor because it's probably cheaper for them in many cases. In startup world, it's pretty rare they go the copycat route. You can cite examples, but that is survivorship bias ignoring the many more they do not copy.
The biggest issue with bigtech is actually hiring. They suck up the labor market and make it hard to get good people affordably. The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me.
Beyond network effects (i.e. Microsoft's mortal grip on enterprise IT), there is also concentration of capital (i.e. many or most of Google's products were acquired, including Advertising!). You can't disrupt a monopoly from within.
I think disruption occurs at certain watershed moments where a rapid paradigm change occurs: www, bitcoin, mobile, social, ecommerce, PC, internet. At these moments, growth is so fast and belief is so strong that a movement of previously untapped energy forms around it and this becomes a focal point for investment, concentrated at a single point in spacetime which is powerful enough to penetrate a monopoly.
But only if growth is so abrupt that it can't acquire you first.
And the capitalists are not going to fund the disruption as by definition capitalists operate at a scale where they can't understand it.
> The most important ones are that big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever.
The tech giants are not only good at whatever they're doing but are also capable of refreshing their expertise every 5 years or so, or even reinventing themselves as necessary. Neither Google nor Facebook are the same companies as they were 15 years ago.
I worry that like some of the major [evil] banks that survived world wars and major crises, the tech giants aren't going away, and neither will it be easy to compete with them.
There are 2 major things the author fails to mention or address:
1) Even if Big Tech is not allowed (or chooses not to) compete directly, they’ve invested massively in creating platforms that power everything, especially other tech companies. eg Every new company starts off in AWS/GCP and most mature companies run their services on the cloud. It seems unlikely that they will be displaced here.
2) They’ve created an unprecedented concentration of skills, both in building and operating systems at scale. We do see a lot of scholarly material coming out of eg Google that has inspired OSS tools (not to mention directly to OSS like K8s or Android) and a bunch of SRE principles by employees (current or former) but with their lucrative compensation and career growth opportunities it looks like Big Tech will do just fine in attracting and retaining this talent.
Which makes me somewhat skeptical if the big tech era will end anytime soon.
One thing I have noticed is friends quitting big tech to join startups and many that remain saying that it’s quite boring; If big tech culture does change in a meaningful way, I see that as a much bigger threat to their dominance.
Dinosaurs were doomed because they were overly adapted to an ecosystem. They were evolutionary hill climbers, just as big tech is currently over adapted to the current environment. It may be years before these present day dinosaurs die out. There may be some catastrophic event that affects the environment or they may just wither. Who knows. But the signs that they are over adapted are certainly present.
Big techs are relevant primarily because there are no other companies that can 1. execute its business reasonably well 2. at the planetary scale. There are some other factors including anti-competitive business practices but that won't work without its own edge; MS was not able to stop Google and the same thing for Google to FB as well.
I've seen many HN readers claiming they can build a FB clone overnight, but that's not even the tip of iceberg. Serving your service to billions of people across hundreds of different languages, cultures geographical areas with different legal, financial, logistical infrastructures is at the fundamentally different level of complexity than building a toy project. This is not just for big techs, there are literally thousands of uninteresting but extremely profitable businesses simply for this very reason. And big techs owns platform which brings them to another level...
No. The big tech era won't stop. IBM got replaced by Microsoft. Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs, FAANGs will get replaced by other more ferocious animals.
The article correctly states that monopolies aren't going to last long. But what the author didn't realize is there will always gonna be monopolies because the way society is constructed and the markets works incentivizes building monopolies.
We are in the game of Monopoly. If a player lasts until the end of the game he is doomed to build a monopoly.
Microsoft is still there with a $2.4T market cap. In the context of a discussion about big tech, Netflix is not really part of it. Although the FAANG acronym kind of stuck.
Uh, what? Microsoft is currently the 2nd largest company in the world, sometimes it’s the largest. Do you have any idea how many people use say, Office 365 in a given week?
Netflix is 1/10th of the size by market cap, I don’t understand why it’s even a part of the acronym.
Personally, I hold individual shares of MSFT and AAPL and no other big tech company exposure outside of index funds.
Have you written a document or spreadsheet for a company lately? Microsoft is happy that nobody thinks of these things when discussing antitrust, but do you remember when there were choices other than Word and Excel?
Since Microsoft never got replaced, this doesn’t work out so well. To keep with the logic. A chunk of big tech will still be huge huge in 30 or 40 years.
Phase 4: It is not "magic" anymore. Was it even magic to begin with. Did people working on computers in the 1950's refer to "magic". Did people describe early electronic calculators as "magic".
Remember the 1990's install/configuation programs that were styled as "wizards", some including a silly pointy hat icon or character with a wand. Personally, I just could never buy into that metaphor.
I think it is ending, and I like the magic analogy used in the article.
You've seen it before, with IBM, blockbuster, the entire music industry. Business entities get big and think their size protects them from disruption, they begin to implement abusive policies that pay off short term and don't worry about long term because they think their size protects them. This gravy train could go on forever it appears in the moment. Of course we have the advantage of hindsight.
I think the same thing is beginning to happen to big tech. They're beginning to abuse users. Simultaneously, there are lots of alternative options to all of their products being developed.
I see either them being supplanted by new companies (with a couple of course adapting and surviving), or the industry being disrupted heavily by novel ideas. I'd prefer the latter of course, but I will take either.
> My coffee shop is not an existential threat to Amazon, which retains huge advantages of scale. But before, Amazon was the only firm that could really do ecommerce. Now, everywhere can.
This is not a good example. In 2000 , it wasnt harder for the coffee shop to make a website than it was for amazon, and their challenges were similar: how to accept payments and how to deliver. Amazon solved those through scale, the coffee shop did not solve either of them (the author admits they send their kid to do deliveries). Accepting payments problem is easier today, but still not easy, and still not comparable with the world of cash where everyone everywhere has equal access to payments.
Without some massive new tech that will break the moats of bigtech (payments, logistics network, lock-in via identity) i dont think bigtech will unbundle
Much of big tech has no physical inputs or outputs. It's mostly network effect holding companies the big tech companies together. There is some gained efficiency at scale when it comes to software as a service, but the actual barrier to entry can be scaled by an individual or a small collective (open source).
The main input of the social networks is US, and our consent. If they break our trust, we start looking around for alternatives, and it might take a while, but we all hold grudges, and will route around their damage.
We must retain access to general purpose computing, if we do that, we can keep routing around their mistakes, accidental, or not.
[+] [-] hackthefender|4 years ago|reply
I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of network effects. You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it.
In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope that everything will just magically get better now that your local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf software seems slightly optimistic.
But I hope I'm wrong.
[+] [-] bko|4 years ago|reply
They're incredibly useful to the state as large monolithic entities. It's much easier to spy on people and exert influence. Imagine the feds chasing dozens of social media platforms to fight election interference.
There is no chance any legislative body will break up tech. They'll more likely go the bank route and make them too big to fail, and regulate them, which amounts to giving the government direct or indirect power in what speech is allowed on the platform.
[+] [-] civilized|4 years ago|reply
Come on, can't anyone make a product that connects friends better than FB? I'm sure it's technically amazing, but from a product perspective, my god, look at the thing, it's an absolute garbage fire. You can tell from the notifications it sends that it wants you to watch shitty videos and read shitty news articles alone, not connect you with your friends.
Make a social network that feels like an actual social space and not an ad-infested media shithole, and I'll sign up, my friends will sign up, everyone will sign up, and FB will be toast in a couple months.
[+] [-] dash2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|4 years ago|reply
And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them doing that.
[+] [-] michaelbrave|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nus07|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannyBee|4 years ago|reply
The thing that is amusing is that US/Europe seem to think they will be able to deal with this and effectively regulate them, despite not succeeding at this at all in the past (see China + IP, etc).
One major reason is that China is willing to play "unfairly" to support its companies. US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much. They will attempt what they do now, which is to regulate them in various ways to "ensure competition"
But when you go to do that to a chinese company, the government will find a way to make it hurt for you. You make it hurt for Chinese Search Engine Company, they will ban the chip companies from making chips for you, etc. They are much better at this game than the other governments.
[+] [-] root_axis|4 years ago|reply
Much easier said than done. FB is a massive product, I don't think anyone can realistically predict how something that really had all the features of FB would actually fare. Beyond that, we know that new networks are created all the time despite the existence of other big ones. Based on your premise, tiktok shouldn't have existed, nor insta, nor snapchat. Network effects matter but if the product actually does something useful or better and is well designed, people will come.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwertyuiop_|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/10/ubers-david-plouffe-to-join-...
[1]https://www.apple.com/leadership/lisa-jackson/
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
Big tech is the existing reality and it can only be changed by making it obsolete. The digital technology for doing so is actually available (or can be refined rapidly). What is not available is the social technology: the attitude of governments and regulators, solid, honest-to-goodness business models, the education of the populace etc
[+] [-] 58x14|4 years ago|reply
Decentralized technology is rife with fraud and noise, but ENS is an exemplary preview of a Web3 future. Like SSO without a middleman. It's a far superior user experience (no password requirements, email verification, data leaks), and allows developers to bypass account management altogether when building a webapp. To me, it's glaringly obvious this is one of the most significant milestones in our transition to a better web.
[+] [-] smugglerFlynn|4 years ago|reply
Good luck competing when your innovation can be copied by tech giant in a matter of months, your price tag could be beaten overnight with dumping, and your business could be bought out to suffocate in the basements of Alphabet.
Fortunately, our society both understands the dangers of monopolies, and has tools (regulations) to balance them out. Could anti-monopoly lawsuits happen that would force break big tech? That has happened in the past, see Bell System[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
[+] [-] pjkundert|4 years ago|reply
Implementing centralized application rules on completely decentralized compute/networking foundations is now a thing.
Let's say you want to build something like Mars Coin. It's gotta work reliably at the scale of billions of nodes, separated by minutes of transit time, at billions of aggregate transactions per second, at a cost below micro-cents per transaction. Without the possibility of being shut down by a government-scale bad actor.
This is now becoming possible: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/mars-coin/
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
Are Shopify, Stripe, and Square not big tech? Maybe medium-big instead of mega-big?
[+] [-] dash2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinnymuch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|4 years ago|reply
Scale is something we have not really taken on board as we head to 10 billion humans. And when we look critically at the Big in big tech now, they are really bit-players with leverage. News aggregators, search engines, publishing platforms. The traditional "media" have had outside influence and this new globalised generation has that, but compared to what's likely to come it's nothing.
Global pharma, energy, transportation, new manufacturing, supply chain observability, consumer friendly finance. These things and more will have huge impacts - and all will have software at their hearts.
If that (software) is what we mean by Tech, then yeah, Google is a minnow to come.
But there is hope. Software (and observability) are incredibly amenable to democracy and independent monitoring, to smart regulation and smart outcomes.
It's a political challenge to manage the wealth to come - but look at how the USA handled the robber barons. It took massive system wide political change if it happened.
Don't give up. But Vote Harder.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptica|4 years ago|reply
Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.
[+] [-] Causality1|4 years ago|reply
Who do you think could make big tech fall? The politicians who think it's perfect the way it is or the ones who think it needs to be much worse?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] streetcat1|4 years ago|reply
The problem is not that you coffee store can do ecommerce, but that nobody can find your coffee store if it is not in amazon, or does not buy ads from google/facebook.
[+] [-] ahdh8f4hf4h8|4 years ago|reply
I also don't think tech will have long lasting monopolies, unless government regulation makes it so. Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? All of these were dominant at one point.
I do expect a shift in investor mindset - right now tech companies are not held to the same profitability standards, so the tech stocks are very expensive for even wildly optimistic projections of future growth. It's as if the market is already pricing in a future monopoly for these companies. Given how fragile tech monopolies tend to be, I expect a correction at some point (not a good short though - no way to predict the timing)
[+] [-] novok|4 years ago|reply
Because if you've worked at these companies, you know you can spin circles around them in execution speed alone. Not to mention way too many things are too small scale for them to even pay attention to.
And if your successful, they would rather buy you most of the time than make a competitor because it's probably cheaper for them in many cases. In startup world, it's pretty rare they go the copycat route. You can cite examples, but that is survivorship bias ignoring the many more they do not copy.
The biggest issue with bigtech is actually hiring. They suck up the labor market and make it hard to get good people affordably. The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me.
[+] [-] dustingetz|4 years ago|reply
I think disruption occurs at certain watershed moments where a rapid paradigm change occurs: www, bitcoin, mobile, social, ecommerce, PC, internet. At these moments, growth is so fast and belief is so strong that a movement of previously untapped energy forms around it and this becomes a focal point for investment, concentrated at a single point in spacetime which is powerful enough to penetrate a monopoly.
But only if growth is so abrupt that it can't acquire you first.
And the capitalists are not going to fund the disruption as by definition capitalists operate at a scale where they can't understand it.
[+] [-] mojuba|4 years ago|reply
The tech giants are not only good at whatever they're doing but are also capable of refreshing their expertise every 5 years or so, or even reinventing themselves as necessary. Neither Google nor Facebook are the same companies as they were 15 years ago.
I worry that like some of the major [evil] banks that survived world wars and major crises, the tech giants aren't going away, and neither will it be easy to compete with them.
[+] [-] thrav|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atemerev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|4 years ago|reply
1) Even if Big Tech is not allowed (or chooses not to) compete directly, they’ve invested massively in creating platforms that power everything, especially other tech companies. eg Every new company starts off in AWS/GCP and most mature companies run their services on the cloud. It seems unlikely that they will be displaced here.
2) They’ve created an unprecedented concentration of skills, both in building and operating systems at scale. We do see a lot of scholarly material coming out of eg Google that has inspired OSS tools (not to mention directly to OSS like K8s or Android) and a bunch of SRE principles by employees (current or former) but with their lucrative compensation and career growth opportunities it looks like Big Tech will do just fine in attracting and retaining this talent.
Which makes me somewhat skeptical if the big tech era will end anytime soon.
One thing I have noticed is friends quitting big tech to join startups and many that remain saying that it’s quite boring; If big tech culture does change in a meaningful way, I see that as a much bigger threat to their dominance.
[+] [-] talkingtab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] summerlight|4 years ago|reply
I've seen many HN readers claiming they can build a FB clone overnight, but that's not even the tip of iceberg. Serving your service to billions of people across hundreds of different languages, cultures geographical areas with different legal, financial, logistical infrastructures is at the fundamentally different level of complexity than building a toy project. This is not just for big techs, there are literally thousands of uninteresting but extremely profitable businesses simply for this very reason. And big techs owns platform which brings them to another level...
[+] [-] gusbremm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DeathArrow|4 years ago|reply
The article correctly states that monopolies aren't going to last long. But what the author didn't realize is there will always gonna be monopolies because the way society is constructed and the markets works incentivizes building monopolies.
We are in the game of Monopoly. If a player lasts until the end of the game he is doomed to build a monopoly.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|4 years ago|reply
Microsoft is still there with a $2.4T market cap. In the context of a discussion about big tech, Netflix is not really part of it. Although the FAANG acronym kind of stuck.
[+] [-] seaman1921|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrowman|4 years ago|reply
Uh, what? Microsoft is currently the 2nd largest company in the world, sometimes it’s the largest. Do you have any idea how many people use say, Office 365 in a given week?
Netflix is 1/10th of the size by market cap, I don’t understand why it’s even a part of the acronym.
Personally, I hold individual shares of MSFT and AAPL and no other big tech company exposure outside of index funds.
[+] [-] kwertyoowiyop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinnymuch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
Remember the 1990's install/configuation programs that were styled as "wizards", some including a silly pointy hat icon or character with a wand. Personally, I just could never buy into that metaphor.
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
You've seen it before, with IBM, blockbuster, the entire music industry. Business entities get big and think their size protects them from disruption, they begin to implement abusive policies that pay off short term and don't worry about long term because they think their size protects them. This gravy train could go on forever it appears in the moment. Of course we have the advantage of hindsight.
I think the same thing is beginning to happen to big tech. They're beginning to abuse users. Simultaneously, there are lots of alternative options to all of their products being developed.
I see either them being supplanted by new companies (with a couple of course adapting and surviving), or the industry being disrupted heavily by novel ideas. I'd prefer the latter of course, but I will take either.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
This is not a good example. In 2000 , it wasnt harder for the coffee shop to make a website than it was for amazon, and their challenges were similar: how to accept payments and how to deliver. Amazon solved those through scale, the coffee shop did not solve either of them (the author admits they send their kid to do deliveries). Accepting payments problem is easier today, but still not easy, and still not comparable with the world of cash where everyone everywhere has equal access to payments.
Without some massive new tech that will break the moats of bigtech (payments, logistics network, lock-in via identity) i dont think bigtech will unbundle
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
1. historically institutions get larger and larger until busted up
2. they tend to buy out anyone who has a better technology and swallow it up
3. technology isn't going anywhere.
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
The main input of the social networks is US, and our consent. If they break our trust, we start looking around for alternatives, and it might take a while, but we all hold grudges, and will route around their damage.
We must retain access to general purpose computing, if we do that, we can keep routing around their mistakes, accidental, or not.