Is the big tech era ending?

https://wyclif.substack.com/p/is-the-big-tech-era-ending

by dash2 • 5 years ago

247 350 5 years ago

wyclif.substack.com

i_am_proteus• 5 years ago

[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

hackthefender• 5 years ago

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.

But I hope I'm wrong.

dash29• 5 years ago

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.

pdimitar28• 5 years ago

it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom

Only because Microsoft probably assigned two interns to maintain Skype in the last 5 (if not more) years. I do agree with your point though.

izelnakri• 5 years ago

However there is no good alternative for Meta’s Facebook, despite its degrading web UI over the years. I dont think its that much of a problem growing at 1-2% per month instead of 20-25% for any new social network.

People should ideally stop using whatsapp and move over to Telegram as it seems to be the only one that has whatsapp UX parity. Thats what I did, and I also have signal, discord etc and I own no shares of Telegram.

orlovs• 5 years ago

Did not thread fully, but I get your point. I know large portion hacker news audience dont like Sowell (and other Chicago school econs). In Basic Economy he defines that monopoly cant be defined “market share”, but how hard is to migrate off/open new competitors. Seing how tiktok eating userbase for fb. Its hardly defined as monopoly in social media angle. There should be more

bostik2• 5 years ago

If Skype had remained as useful and easy to use as it was >10 years ago, Zoom would

A) probably never have picked up steam, and

B) had a much steeper uphill battle

Before the plague hit only startups really used Zoom. The corporate video call space was dominated by things like Webex (awful), BlueJeans (awful), whatever MS morphed into current Teams (only slightly less awful), or if you were lucky, Google Hangouts (also just slightly less awful). Skype wasn't even a contender, and even against the kind of all-star field I just listed, it was a shitty experience - which says a lot.

There was a big void for real-time video business conferencing that "just worked", but until early 2020, the space was cornered off by giants who saw it, at best, as barren ground. Enter global, mandatory remote working and all of a sudden the existing players had nothing to offer. The market had stagnated, and beancounters had driven out all expensive innovation. All of a sudden, the space blows up and the neglected main tech in use is no longer fit for the new purpose.

Zoom has a lot of problems, but what they did have was a product that "just worked" in almost any setup, coupled with architecture and infrastructure that at least COULD respond to insane, long-lasting spike in demand.

Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to make space for someone less atrocious. Zoom just happened to catch the tailwind, mostly because all the existing players had also abandoned the space but would not dare to leave it unguarded.

DannyBee2• 5 years ago

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.

karmasimida• 5 years ago

China's tech companies, supported and subsidized by the government, will take over.

This is going to be unlikely, when the Chinese government is actively kneecapping its own big techs.

Data is going to be regulated like money, and not everyone is going to have the privilege to operate data on one's soil moving forward. No western companies could do in China, or vice versa.

US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much.

They can just ask it to sell, which was happening to TikTok, or setting up joint venture capital. They are many ways to do such things, government can make you bleed if they want to.

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

It depends on what we are talking about in regards to "big tech".

It's not clear to me that products like Facebook that are primarily driven by cultural rather than technical dominance are something that the Chinese are likely to be able to dominate in. Facebook dominates because your friends and family and hobbies and whatever are on there, doing their thing. When they stop doing that, Facebook won't dominate anymore.

Now if Han culture becomes internationally dominant as the "cool" culture which North Americans Europeans aspire to emulate (like how American culture was internationally in the post WWII era through, say, the early 90s), then all bets are off -- but I think the trend is actually going opposite to that now.

Until then, there will be social networks that dominate in China and there will be social networks that dominate in Europe and North America; because culturally (and politically, obviously) and they will rarely overlap as these are still two very distinct entities.

I think it's likely that the same argument applies to a lesser degree to the ads space, and maybe even to commerce. Something like AliExpress feels worlds apart from Amazon despite the latter become increasingly a wild west of knock-off discount Chinese products anyways.

cma• 5 years ago

The US funded EUV technology (the tech behind 7nm and below), and have used that DARPA funding to prevent Europe's ASML from selling to China. It seems to be almost exactly what you are warning about in reverse.

agumonkey4• 5 years ago

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.

cblconfederate7• 5 years ago

that s not true. many different social networks existed, and many were very close to facebook. there were even blogs etc. Facebook was the only one willing to ruthlessly go after people's contacts lists, and get them to use their real names so even non-internet users would undestand it. After it had picked up exponentially more users it was basically impossible to match for others.

civilized4• 5 years ago

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.

wintermutestwin• 5 years ago

I agree with you, but queue the responses implying that without adtech stalkerware there is no way to pay for it.

My response to that tired theme: you don't need a mega $B valuation to pay for a simple social network for sharing baby pics with friends and family. A non-profit or a benefit corp structure would be just fine.

root_axis• 5 years ago

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.

tim333• 5 years ago

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.

robryan• 5 years ago

It is kind of working now, I doubt they would be able to buy TikTok. I don’t recall them being involved at all when Trump was trying to force its sale.

But yeah big tech needs to be massive before it comes under any real antitrust scrutiny.

cblconfederate7• 5 years ago

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)

michaelbrave• 5 years ago

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.

roguas• 5 years ago

Right now, I see there a 2 approaches. 1. crypto/blockchain - redo everything literally 2. federated services - such as mastodon, discord?... for the most part you have some identity within larger ecosystem, but you can easily run your private community

Question is if road further is a small shift in how services get constructed or complete rewrite in new ecosystem. People betting on web3 are doing wild bets. At the same time people betting on federated are doing very conservative bet on mental shift that is wild(since getting traction on federated is difficult - 98% of people have no real benefit).

bko• 5 years ago

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.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

It’s quite a perverse situation because it amounts to the government running around legal protections (like the first amendment) by simply having virtually all societal speech exist in privately controlled spaces. They can simply use the threat of legislative action to influence that private space. Glenn Greenwald has written a few different pieces about this, like: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...

nus07• 5 years ago

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 .

pram• 5 years ago

Agreed, I’ve been saying this for years now to friends lol. There was a big culture shift but no one remembers how it was before.

Dot com explosion had a long tail. IT was for losers in the 00s and everyone wanted to be a quant and work for GS. The field was very unsexy.

qwertyuiop_• 5 years ago

Wait Big Tech hired most of Washington political hacks as VPs & SVPs. Thats regulatory capture.[0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/10/ubers-david-plouffe-to-join-...

[1]https://www.apple.com/leadership/lisa-jackson/

api• 5 years ago

The most powerful disruptor of big tech would be to figure out how to escape, sidestep, or easily coopt their network effects.

slackfan• 5 years ago

The Amish are the fastest growing population group...

pdimitar28• 5 years ago

Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days.

The big tech era is in fact now just starting. The big corporations finally realized nobody is seriously challenging them so they will only tighten the grip gradually from here on.

I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access.

Keep your guard up, folks, and improve your hardware operation skills -- and any physical real-life skills in general. We can't all be dependent on the corps, they must always be shown we can do without them and we only tolerate them because they are not too unpleasant.

tapan_jk• 5 years ago

A comment about one aspect of big tech, i.e IT infrastructure (think AWS, GCP, Azure, and now Cloudflare etc.):

I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising if some companies will want to start owning and running their own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is -- is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).

taf2• 5 years ago

IMO the thing to watch for is regulations around what rules you need to follow to be compliant in how you operate your data center or physical servers. It’s very likely big tech will lobby for rules that appear to be anti big tech but actually will make it harder to operate independent from a big tech provider… think net neutrality (not saying I don’t think we need it just as an example)

sofixa3• 5 years ago

Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing, might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.

qchris• 5 years ago

I believe this has been stated to be the core thesis behind Oxide Computer Company's business model.

pdimitar28• 5 years ago

Currently I work in a company that's very cost-conscious about hosting. They are generous in salaries but are mercilessly practical about IT costs and the abilities of computers -- especially the latter part is something that most of the programmers today have almost completely forgot.

I have 3 spare laptops lying around; weakest of them is with a Celeron J4155 and I have put a web app with no caching on it (it does have a persistent DB) and hammered it with my workstation until it finally started giving up at ~2500 req/s (Elixir/Phoenix stack). Again, that's a Celeron J4155 with a SATA III SSD in an M.2 factor (so disk speed caps at 550MB/s at best; usually 400-460) and 12GB RAM. Most programmers wouldn't touch such a machine.

I imagine I can buy 2 more of these laptops and make a completely replicated 3-cluster of the entire stack of our company and the slowest requests (on admin UI where we have a lot of SQL JOINs) would likely never go above 200ms. That totals at about 600 EUR (yep, I bought the laptop second-hand for 200 EUR). Then 500 more EUR for a good UPS to plug the laptops and my routers to. Boom 1100 EUR and several weekends later I can likely charge my own employer for hosting at 100 EUR a month for their entire infrastructure and I would likely still be ripping them off even with that.

The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems.

So yep, I am completely with you here (if my rant didn't make it obvious). Infrastructure costs are already being heavily optimized by companies out there.

kazen445• 5 years ago

but this is already the case for a LOT of companies. HN seems so focused on cloud and sillicon valley that they forget there are hundreds of datacenters filled with colocated space and connectivity.

Colo is cheap, connectivity is cheaper then it has ever been, and most bussiness don't require massive scaling to do their bussiness.

Also, owning your own infra allows you to innovate and play a game outside of the borders aws, gcp and azure are drawing up for you.

simonbarker87• 5 years ago

Right now there is a lot of money to be made in moving companies to the cloud, I predict that in 10-20 years time there will be a lot of money to be made moving them out of that same cloud.

I hate having to learn all of AWS, GCP and Azure proprietary tech, I’ll take a Linode box any day thank you

xuki• 5 years ago

I was thinking the exact same thing recently. If you can setup and manage an infrastructure by yourself, you have pretty good advantage in term of cost.

ksec2• 5 years ago

I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity

https://oxide.computer

But most of the problem isn't with infrastructure. Once you start using AWS's services it is the software that is most problematic. And that is why all these infrastructure / cloud provider wants to do serverless.

ape4• 5 years ago

Are any companies selling a package to make this happen. Your Own Cloud Starter kit only $1.5M

0KnowledgeGoof4• 5 years ago

On a related note, I run noscript on my browser and overall it's not a bad experience. The conveniences IMO outweigh the inconveniences.

However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their own servers.

If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web are bewildering.

lowwave2• 5 years ago

Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days.

In some way wish it is ending. As human society, we don't need any more mega big company. Everything ought to kept local and small and diverse, so there is no central control, it is only resilient way to thrive for tech and innovation.

pdimitar28• 5 years ago

I wish that too, believe me, but the interests of the corps is to pull us towards a cyberpunk future when they can stop your (artificial and cloud-connected) liver from working if you post something vaguely anti-establishment somewhere. They have been very trigger happy lately.

cute_boi• 5 years ago

Hmm, Many corps, government, humans etc. aim to become bigger and global. So, there is no easy way to keep them local, small and diverse. And once they grow big most of them turns blind eye on small local companies just like how amazon is doing now.

This is a problem that will prevail forever and can't be solved easily. We can experience today too in china the government do crackdown but most of us hate it right? If they don't regulate they grow beyond party.

(Taking example of china because I don't know other country which does crackdown on big giants like this)

Mountain_Skies• 5 years ago

But what if one of those local, small, and diverse communities doesn't conform to the globally approved ideology? Diversity in modern culture means physical window dressing. True diversity of communities might lead to people with no-no values living with others with the same no-no values. How can that be allowed?

dash29• 5 years ago

Apple sells billions of iPhones, all with the same hardware and OS. As a result it can afford to spend a lot of money on design.

You would not enjoy an iPhone made by your local electrician.

mehdix• 5 years ago

I'm doing my part:

- Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.

ramesh31• 5 years ago

Unfortunately you were never the target audience. Companies like Google operate on the scale of billions, and the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.

tartoran2• 5 years ago

Im on the same page but personally I think it won’t make a big difference.

throwaway894345• 5 years ago

Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days.

Cynically I suspect the lobbyists defeat it before it is even signed (ensuring the legislation has appropriate loopholes, etc).

roody15• 5 years ago

Agree feel like we have entered Blade Runner style future where mega tech corporations essentially run everything.

yyyk3• 5 years ago

I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access.

Big tech is unlikely to attack that way. It's far better for big tech to stop these things via new technology, rather than try a political process which will require expensive brib^W lobbying and is subject to backlash. Big tech have a far bigger advantage on the tech front than the political front.

PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).

darepublic2• 5 years ago

I think big tech will attack that way once they start to feel threatened enough by competing innovation, or they can't hang on to their advantage through softer means

pdimitar28• 5 years ago

IMO they attack on all fronts, the one both me and you mentioned included.

Gmail is pretty much a standard right now (even if there's no public technical standard involved; only Google's apps can communicate with Gmail). That's monopoly dressed as "new technology".

In the meantime the pressure in the EU is mounting between the both camps of the encrypted messaging ecosystem.

So yeah, both things are happening in parallel.

PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).

Yeah, you're sadly correct. I dread the day when this will start becoming the norm. But it's also true that many common citizens can stop using service X or Y and it would cost them nearly nothing (with some prominent exceptions like Gmail or Whatsapp).

darepublic2• 5 years ago

Agree that it's small tech in danger

marto1• 5 years ago

If anything introducing new legislation clearly helps out big tech in the end by raising the bar for their (smaller) competition thus deepening their moat even further.

It's no wonder FB is pretty much always positive about this law or that law that will supposedly regulate tech in one way or another.

throwaway472925• 5 years ago

Remember, things are never as good or as bad as you think.

'Offline' internet can come back, we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing, maybe go online from time to time to get the newest /etc/hosts from your friends and the new locations for microsd cards near you.

Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.

Pi zero 2W costs 10$ and with 40$ screen you can watch feynman lectures with mplayer -vo fbdev, it boots into vim for 3 seconds (init into openvt -w vim kinda thing).

Soon the-eye.eu will be back (hopefully).

The new phrack is out.

The social networks are eating themselves, same as google is eating itself, the search is garbage, the feed is even more garbage, 99% of the content is anxiety inducing miasma.

The web is eating itself, with gazillions of GPT(ish) generated articles.

Let it go, life always finds a way.

Nextgrid2• 5 years ago

/etc/hosts
Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.
Pi zero 2W

Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of people with the skills necessary to use this is low. Not to mention that new generations have grown up with the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search for alternatives.

If things get really bad (a debate for which I'm not taking either side), only a very small minority will be able to use the aforementioned workarounds and can trivially be marginalized and crushed with legislation and its enforcement.

pdimitar28• 5 years ago

Been a programmer professionally for 20 years now and I regret not learning more sysadmin skills. But I'll catch up.

In the meantime, more links about how these things are done will be appreciated.

reaperducer2• 5 years ago

we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing

For a short while, when sneakernet was still higher capacity than the internet, people used to embed USB drives in trees and other public places. You'd walk up, plug in, and download the content. Things like full wikis of specialized subjects. Or videos of neighborhood events. Ideally, they were always made somehow read-only. I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen if they were read/write. We'd be right back to the internet we have today.

Still, it's something I do wish would have taken off. Maybe we could still do something like that today by setting up miniature web BBSes on hotspots in or near public parks. Not everything in the world should be open to the entire planet. As long as you weren't in a tourist district, you could be pretty sure the content was at least locally generated.

emptyfile• 5 years ago

the-eye.eu

The fat that this website is down and only links to their Discord is very ironic.

varelse• 5 years ago

So apparently the US government is very responsive to the concerns of anti-competitive behavior when it's between one corporation versus another.

But they seem particularly apathetic to the privacy considerations, robocalls and all things telemarketing, junk mail, insane product placement, and the blatant manipulation of our dopamine system by such corporations.

Does that sound like something that's going to end the big tech era or just keep driving it further?

jcun4128• 5 years ago

PiHole might get criminalized

That would suck, I hate ads but also just like split up subscription shows, not sure if I'm willing to pay for that either. There's so many I am currently subscribed to 3 different shows and maybe watch 1% of their content. I wanted to watch a movie and I would have had to get Paramount Plus like wtf... at least a lot of things show up on YT where I can rent it there.

My response is primarily about YT and mobile phone usage (where I don't have a browser extension adblocker). On mobile I don't open websites, just scan the suggested articles.

zcw100• 5 years ago

It's like saying, "Oh no they're talking about breaking up Ma Bell. Telecommunications is over." Sure Bell got broken up but the industry as a whole ballooned.

mojuba• 5 years ago

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.

thrav• 5 years ago

Or, ya know, just buying whatever hot new thing that gets invented and has traction.

amelius2• 5 years ago

For BigTech, the era is just beginning. For the small guy, yes, the era is ending.

atemerev3• 5 years ago

The point of the article is exactly the opposite.

amelius2• 5 years ago

The article is wrong because knowledge won't help you much in a world where you need money, connections and manpower. E.g. even with all the knowledge, a small company cannot run a silicon fab. You are always dependent on Big Corps, who are just starting to figure out how they can become modern age feudal lords.

beebeepka• 5 years ago

Article is selling false/misguided hope

atemerev3• 5 years ago

Now, in the world of crypto, we are exactly at stage one. "Ordinary people are profoundly ignorant about the wizardry that has appeared in their midst. They know it is powerful, but they don’t really know how it works. Rich people throw money at any wizard, hoping they will have the secret to eternal youth, or a bottomless sack of gold. Naturally, this generates a crowd of charlatan conjurers in fancy robes and hats. Only true wizards can tell a true wizard from a charlatan – but the true wizards are too busy selling spells of their own."

nodemaker2• 5 years ago

Thats interesting. Is this from a russian novel of some kind?

reboog7112• 5 years ago

Isn't it from the linked article?

streetcat1• 5 years ago

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.

DeathArrow• 5 years ago

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.

lotsofpulp8• 5 years ago

Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs

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.

yyyk3• 5 years ago

MAGMA is a better acronym nowadays, as Microsoft is far larger than Netflix, and Facebook renamed to Meta.

seaman19212• 5 years ago

In what universe did Microsoft get replaced ? Did you see the recent stock performance and jump in valuation of the company ? It is still a beast.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

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?

sobkas3• 5 years ago

but do you remember when there were choices other than Word and Excel?

It was so great to use different incompatible file formats/office suites when you wanted to send a file to someone.

quickthrowman• 5 years ago

Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs,

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.

reboog7112• 5 years ago

I don’t understand why it’s even a part of the acronym.

Because the amount it pays developers. The acronym is used in conversations about high paying tech / programming / IT jobs.

skinnymuch5• 5 years ago

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.

PedroBatista• 5 years ago

The shameless party in the open might be starting to start to end, nothing else.

They’ll need to become more discreet and pay the right people more. Legally different companies will be controlled by the same group of people like some pseudo shadow board. Nothing new, nothing innovative.

Don’t get me wrong, things will change but be the same where it really matters.

lifeisstillgood2• 5 years ago

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.

Don't give up. But Vote Harder.

cryptica3• 5 years ago

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.

opportune• 5 years ago

This doesn’t make any sense. Parent is talking about how you can make a single product with a TAM of ~all of earths population. What does that have to do with money printing/fiat, besides perhaps causing an overvaluation?

Even if those companies were overvalued, it doesn’t change the fact that technology and free trade enable hyper-scaling businesses.

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

People have been moving into cities since time immemorial. Small farmers would move to Roman cities in search of higher paying jobs, or the dole. The Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated urbanization. All of that predates fiat currency.

cblconfederate7• 5 years ago

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.

lifeisstillgood2• 5 years ago

If I understand you, you are saying that in a democracy the majority "oppress" the minority(ies).

It maybe a "no true scotsman" argument but a society that legally oppresses a minority is hard to call a democracy- it is quite possible to argue that America was not a democracy until 1965.

And it is highly unlikely we will all become some homogeneous voting lump - there are enough modern democracies that are so distinct in just their voting processes, let alone choices in fiscal policy, culture and so on to keep diversity alive.

goodpoint• 5 years ago

Globalizing democracy means that increasingly , half of the population of the earth will be oppressed by the other half

History shows the very opposite. Oppression goes hand in hand with empires, dictatorships and colonial powers.

At least the division of nations leaves people with the option to leave one democracy and go live in another that fits them better

You are confusing nations borders, democracy and decentralization.

clement_b• 5 years ago

Had fun checking where the hyperlinks of that article pointed to.

benjaminwootton• 5 years ago

The article started by making some interesting points but it lost me at the wizard stuff.

wrycoder• 5 years ago

As usual, the HN commentary is far more interesting than the linked article.

sh4un• 5 years ago

It's funny how you think voting for the same idiots will save anything.

hanniabu• 5 years ago

The web2 era is ending while the web3 era is just getting started

_alex_2• 5 years ago

web3 just needs to come up with some problems for all it's solutions

cryptica3• 5 years ago

I hope so. Out with big tech, in with small decentralized tech.

xg15• 5 years ago

The great dark towers of the necromancers, which tried to do everything magical under one roof, suffer the usual problems of conglomerates: weak incentives, and no specialist expertise. Eventually their empires shrink.

Except we went through this a few times already. E.g. on the consumer side, there was dot com (open), AOL (conglomerate), web 2.0 (open) and now FAANG (conglomerate).

This looks more like going in circles than one distincive trend.

talkingtab• 5 years ago

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.

mellavora• 5 years ago

Which particular ecosystem of the 300 million years traditionally ascribed to the dinosaur eras where they overly adopted to?

Mammals have only made it 200-250M years, humans *far* less.

and it's not clear the dinosaurs are gone (looks at a bird).

ahdh8f4hf4h82• 5 years ago

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)

seaman19212• 5 years ago

Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine?

This statement would be relevant here if these companies hadn't been replaced by even bigger monopolies. So if facebook and apple is replaced by something even bigger, the folks who are afraid of monopolies would have more to worry about.

ahdh8f4hf4h82• 5 years ago

IBM was a much bigger and more domineering monopoly at it's peak - there was a time where you effectively could not have computers or a datacenter without paying IBM money, directly or indirectly. I wouldn't qualify most of the FAANGs as monopolies (at least not yet) - reasonable substitutes exists for all of them.

The modern market does favor a handful of large players for each market - this is true in almost all sectors though. This not a monopoly though; as long as the top players change over time it is still a working market.

dash29• 5 years ago

Even if few companies "get" good software, big tech might still end if good software companies start to sell disaggregated services. Shopify is an example from the article.

This wouldn't mean there are no big software companies. But it would mean that end-to-end providers like Amazon no longer dominated.

bernardlunn3• 5 years ago

hell yes and here is why: 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. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components.

Regulators are NOT the key!

mooreds• 5 years ago

Seems to me that Shopify, Stripe and Square all are members of BigTech. What am I missing?

bernardlunn3• 5 years ago

Hell yes and here is why: 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. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components.

It is NOT about the regulators!

bernardlunn3• 5 years ago

Hell yes: 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. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components.

NOT about regulators.

lotsofpulp8• 5 years ago

Amazon does not care about competing with small margin retail operations. That is why you cannot filter for items shipped and sold by Amazon.com. They are more interested in the 15%+ profit margin business of being a platform.

Their market cap is $1.7T because of AWS and the commission they collect from third party sellers and the recurring revenue from high margin streaming services. The sourcing and selling physical things to customer business is worth much less, as indicated by Walmart’s market cap of $390B.

elwell• 5 years ago

It's interesting how AWS has taken so much of the market. I suppose it's just a better product + the free tier.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

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?

dash29• 5 years ago

It's a good point. Large companies aren't going away. But the market dominance of a few large companies might go away.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

Additionally, from some quick googling, it looks like Stripe and Square both run on AWS? Shopify used to but now runs on GCS?

Is OP mainly just talking about Amazon's dominance of online consumer shopping specifically, rather than a general thing about "big tech"?

jonas21• 5 years ago

It seems to me like this is a case of new large tech companies coming to dominate new markets while the existing tech companies continue to dominate their old markets.

skinnymuch5• 5 years ago

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.

Nasrudith2• 5 years ago

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.

beardyw• 5 years ago

I think that there is possibility that nation states will awaken to the idea that they could do that, and have the power to take over. Obviously the idea is particularly attractive to more socialist governments, who could see themselves providing their own Amazon, or totalitarian governments, who would look to provide the rest. But I am not sure that would be the limit of it.

pm90• 5 years ago

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.

mrkramer• 5 years ago

It's not ending it is only the beginning because all antirust lawsuits will fail to do anything meaningful.

crdrost• 5 years ago

The article was not about antitrust but about vulgarity. Like the old school vulgarity, “the speech of the common folk.”

The claim is that computation right now belongs to the nobilis and eruditus populus, and things like Excel and Hypercard that bring these things to the vulgus are pathetically limited... But, the story goes, maybe these new tools to wire a bunch of components together—payment gateways with wysiwyg website editors with email—constitute the beginning of a new world where the vulgus can also spread their wings and fly, rather than having to remain in the nest while us mature birds sail the updrafts of programming.

throw_m239339• 5 years ago

No, it's just that, like banking in the en of 2000's the tech sector gets way more scrutiny from the media, the public and politicians, a convenient scapegoat to blame for all the problems. It's interesting how all the same politicians stopped talking about Wall Streets and "fat cat bankers"... the new big bad wolf is now "big tech", in 10 years it will be something else...

dane-pgp2• 5 years ago

The fact that politicians and the media were talking about Wall Street ten years ago during the Great Recession, and talked about it less after economies started to recover, is not all that surprising.

Similarly, the fact that politicians and the media are talking about big tech at a time when social media is being used to (depending on your politics) plan insurrections or deplatform the most important person in the world, doesn't seem like a misdirection from more relevant stories.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting is the purpose of these narratives, but I think you need to be careful that you're not implying that there is a sinister group of people who control the world's media, financial, and political systems, and are using that control to direct people towards "scapegoats" to distract the public from their own nefarious plots.

trabant00• 5 years ago

society starts to learn more about wizardry. Real wizards are distinguished from charlatans by their results. A few wise wizards keep their power and even extend it. Ordinary people still can’t cast spells themselves, but they know the names of the wisest wizards.

They do not know the wizards. Even the article uses Bezos as the target for the "wisest wizards" link. He is a king, not a wizzard! The wizzards are beink kept out of sight in the castles. And the royal courts issues statements that they do not exist. You merely have to use SAFE, Cloud, Containers, etc to have the same results.

gyre007• 5 years ago

wreath• 5 years ago

They aren't going anywhere. We used to be told what to think and what to do by the Church, then by the State and from now on by Big Tech. It's only starting, baby. So buckle up.

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

It's only going to get bigger unless governments put limits on it. I don't see how you can reach any other conclusion given

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.

cblconfederate7• 5 years ago

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

dustingetz• 5 years ago

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.

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

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

58x14• 5 years ago

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.

1270018080• 5 years ago

After cursory googling, it sounds like more blockchain nonsense. Just throwing buzzwords together and solving either a nonexistent problem, or solving it fundamentally worse than anything that already exists.

pjkundert• 5 years ago

Yes, this.

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/

smugglerFlynn• 5 years ago

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System

the-dude• 5 years ago

And https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

boh• 5 years ago

It's obviously not. Persistent growth requirements for corporations will always lead to concentration. You need systematic change, not performative censures on popular companies to actually make an impact.

Microsoft was broken up and it's still "big".

mikewarot• 5 years ago

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.

afterburner• 5 years ago

We just had a big-tech surge. Maybe the massive surge will calm down to not-as-insane growth, but that doesn't feel like an era "ending" to me.

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

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.

summerlight• 5 years ago

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...

gusbremm• 5 years ago

But I bet the early versions of facebook wouldn't scale as well..

charlieyu1• 5 years ago

Had a Facebook account since 2006. You basically have to claim you are an alumni from a school you didn’t go at all

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

I really like the author’s writing style, so much so I just subscribed to their sub stack feed.

I agree with the author that the future is unclear. I think it possible that the current tech megacorps might suffer a decline but if I was betting money I am not sure what fair odds would be. Tossing my own prophecy into the discussion: I think that we will see a combination of smaller distributed decentralized tech and businesses, but some of the giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. will continue to do well as long as they keep enough customers happy.

amznbyebyebye• 5 years ago

There is no soul left in these companies. It has become a day job to collect a paycheck. One guy working on ec2 can move to internal finance reporting can move to s3 and then move to retail (at amazon). Without the soul, at some point the hollowness will cause you to implode. Yes AWS can keep selling tech infra, but the net new innovation is where they suck. Look at how lackluster the reinvent keynotes were.

So what do you do? Innovate with passion. And then what? They come and copy you and sell it at a greater scale, with more marketing $, growing some VPs pnl.

I do think where you still have a chance is software. Big tech still hasn’t cracked software. But it can’t be tech infra software (AWS) and not social software (Fb). So compete where they don’t play is the safest. Because when they try to compete at least they will go through buy or build and will either buy you (and kill your soul) or build a shitty version within.

Causality12• 5 years ago

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?

axegon_• 5 years ago

Well... This [1] kinda answers it. Mind you, it is in the process of evolving into new products and markets. As I said a few days ago, I'm not sure what is next but somehow I'm gravitating towards IoT and embedded devices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Jensson3• 5 years ago

People have known how to make large internet services for 15 years. You see less diversity in services people use today than back then. Everyone knew how to do magic before big tech started dominating, todays state is the steady state where a few big companies who mastered the current formula is dominating, little is happening. You'd need a new big cultural shift like the internet or the smartphone was for things to get upended again. No, crypto isn't it.

yalogin• 5 years ago

This is a tricky subject and I don’t think the big tech era is ending unless three things happen at once -

1. Split all big tech

2. Introduce regulations to clearly specify interoperability rules between networks and ecosystems

3. Regulations to protect privacy of individuals

The problem is if they don’t happen together the big tech will have time to work around them and so the effect will not be as good. We don’t have the political will in this country to make that happen.

ShakataGaNai• 5 years ago

Nope. Not even close. It will change, for sure, but won't end. Look at other industries that have gone through massive consolidation. There are only a few large players in energy space, or cars. Now look at tech? Doesn't even have to go through consolidation, FAANG is already there.

Until the government finds a way to cap the size of companies, or keep them split up... companies will continue to grow.

Maybe big tech will end with the era of megatech.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI

wayeq• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

novok• 5 years ago

"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.

civilized4• 5 years ago

The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me.

Until you get a cool idea and can't stomach fighting the corporate bureaucracy to make it happen, so you start your own company. Like every generation of entrepreneurs before you.

jason0597• 5 years ago

Because if you've worked at these companies [...]

That's quite a rare thing if you look at the overall picture

csomar• 5 years ago

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. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to!

I'm sorry but the local coffee shop was never competing with Amazon in the first place. In fact, the local coffee shop further entrenched big tech because it did not setup its proper ecommerce website, host it on its own servers and processed payments with crypto instead.

The local coffee shop might have in fact jeopardized itself. Some local shops are still relevant because they cater to their specific area. By going online, this shop might give valuable information to what this special area is demanding; and if Amazon can buy this data, it's only a matter of time before the local coffee shop is doomed.

Firms begin to incorporate magic into their production processes. Some wizards specialize in helping particular sectors. Gradually, the dark arts diffuse into the population. The magic becomes mundane.

I have very high doubts. The pandemic did push people online but I hardly find people learning development or technical skills; or at least trying to incorporate them into their workflows. They, at best, use the plug&play tools with no idea how these things work or without even reading the license. They also have no idea how their personal data is used and do not really care.

The OP example of the local coffee shop is revealing. The coffee shop did not build his own website, did not run his own local server and did not process digital crypto payments. He could have done all of that and relied on no company to run his stack. Instead, he just setup a Shoppify store that has everything as plugins and pays a subscription to that.

moneywoes• 5 years ago

If anything small tech companies have been hammered recently e.g docusign, freshworks

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 years ago

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.

lola-hart• 5 years ago

Yep. For the last 30 computers and the internet have revolutionized a lot of aspects of our lives but that is at an end. The way silicon chips can change and improve our society have been exhausted. The solutionism of big tech can't change that. The computer revolution is over now. Time to look in the next revolutionary technology. Probably biotech.

Is the big tech era ending?

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