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I'm not sure what the point of this piece is. There is fierce competition between these five and consumers are better for it. I think you can look at the cloud
by epberry 10y ago
I'm not sure what the point of this piece is. There is fierce competition between these five and consumers are better for it. I think you can look at the cloud war between Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as a great example of competition among these companies producing better technology and lower prices. If there was collusion, we would see cloud costs and technology stagnate like cars from Detroit in the 70s and 80s. Instead the opposite is happening.
- Apocryphon 10y agoI guess the natural question is whether or not having markets be owned by a small number of companies prevents new entrants from competing successfully. I leave that point to be debated by others. On a different note, it's interesting how the presence of the giants affects the startup world. I am reminded of a passage from No Exit by Gideon Lewis-Kraus [0]: 'All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.' [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902
- friedman23 10y agoWhat is your definition of successful? Is it becoming a tech giant, is it being acquired for a billion dollars by a tech giant, or is it being a small profitable company that fills a certain niche and never expands beyond it?
- Apocryphon 10y agoIn the context of discussing monopolies, whichever is most conducive to bringing value to the consumer, and harms the market least. So it's definitely a debatable point.
- panic 10y agoIt's executing on a vision -- making the future you want to happen actually happen.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago> whether or not having markets be owned by a small number of companies prevents new entrants from competing successfully If you consider markets to be an optimization strategy for resource allocation, I think an industry being owned by a small number of successful companies represents a signal that a local maximum has been reached. That's assuming there aren't artificial barriers put up to prevent competition--there often are and I consider a patent an artificial barrier. If your mission is to generate billions of dollars of value where there was none before, a mature industry is not where you should be looking. "The next google" is not a search engine company as we understand the concept today. It's not that consolidation makes it hard to compete, it's that the value has fundamentally been wrung out already. In fact, that "value being wrung out"/profit-growth-at-the-top-of-the-sigmoid-curve is what drives consolidation in the first place.
- james1071 10y agoSomeone needs to learn some economics.
- dave_sullivan 10y agoI think you're going to need to be more specific... If you see errors, please enlighten me.