4 ms·

Software is easy to copy and replace. There's little, if any, monopolization of software technology resources. Software doesn't require huge investment/over-hea

Software is easy to copy and replace. There's little, if any, monopolization of software technology resources. Software doesn't require huge investment/over-head like oil industry. I don't think FB/Google/etc. provide much of anything (or of high value like oil) that is not already replaceable by million other alternatives. One of their key business model is selling ads spaces, but adblocks are also on the rise. I wouldn't bet too highly on those services.

hibikir 9y ago
Every few days we have an article here in HN about a relatively big company, and people throw the classic comment that they don't understand how they need hundreds/thousands of programmers to do what they do, when the prototype of their website can be done by 2 people over a weekend. What you are doing is just a slightly more complex version of this, but the answer is still the same, scale. Software is easier to copy and replace than many other things, but make no mistake: The amount of engineering done at the largest software companies is massive, and has gone way past the point of being easy to replicate. Let's talk someone smaller, like Twitter. Building a Twitter for 100 people is trivial. Scaling it to work well for serious volumes, building all the pieces that make it have actual revenue, and not be just a giant money pit, and all the effort required to build the userbase itself is just enormous. When we go past Twitter, and we think Facebook and Google, serious disruption of their core businesses is really, really hard, because every single user they have is an efficiency you don't. In practice, every large software company today is running a whole lot of machine learning under the hood. Whether it's figuring out which ads to send you, just get you to stay on the site longer, or just have great fraud protection, the difference in data matters. Imagine your machine learning model is trying to sell ads. How much of a disadvantage are you in vs a company that is the user's default search engine, and has analytics hooks in the websites that your target person is on 75% of the time? What if they also have their text messages, know their friends, and their friends' purchases? You can have much better algorithms, but they have such an insane data advantage that you have to be orders of magnitude better to even compete with them! So I'd definitely bet highly on those services, because they've spent years building moats. That doesn't mean they are unbeatable: We all remember the time when Microsoft and IBM looked unbeatable, and we all know what happened, but I don't think anyone without massive funding and a completely new, must have product has a prayer of entering their space and not be swallowed whole.
- marksomnian 9y ago
  Exactly. You don't need all those people to make Twitter. You need all those people to make Twitter work at scale. Yes, technology does move easily, however if there's man-years of labour invested in making it work well at scale, it's suddenly a lot less movable.
- alphydan 9y ago
  Here's an idea: A team of coders in a basement combine lots of AI discoveries done by others (Think merging orthogonal approaches like Numenta + Google Brain + Vicarious + etc). With it, they crack the neo-cortex algorithm (or a rough approximation). It learns outdoors (cameras, actuators), indoors (talking), on the internet, in libraries, on wikipedia, etc. It becomes actually useful. Not: "OK, google set an alarm.", but: "Hey Peter, I'm really stuck with this problem, can you find a solution on SO. Oh, and send flower to my Aunt, you know ... the one who likes pink". If it was freely available I could see a massive migration of users abandoning google. Who needs google in such a context? -- far fetched, yes. But it is a scenario where the breakthrough is algorithmic rather than Huge-data based. The learning can then happens slowly (2 years undercover from that basement?), and emerge as a powerful intelligence and company.
  - s73ver 9y ago
    And we have the same problem we have now. We've just changed the company.
    - PatentTroll 9y ago
      what is the end of this cycle? Does capitalism always tend toward innovation->monopoly->decline->disruption->innovation->monopoly .... ?
  - p1esk 9y ago
    Yeah, maybe, but the coders able to "combine lots of AI discoveries done by others", as well as those who make those discoveries, are likely to work for Google/FB/MS/IBM/Apple/Amazon/etc already (or want to work there). A group like OpenAI also has a good chance to make a breakthrough, but you can hardly call them "a team of coders in a basement". It's unlikely that any a single company (even a large one) will have any significant advantage, because the research everyone does is highly public (everyone tries to publish asap). The research right now is at the stage where people are still looking which way to go, so as soon as someone stumbles upon a promising direction, everyone will jump on it (e.g. AlexNet success in 2012).
PatentTroll 9y ago
I disagree. First is the immense capital investment these companies have in physical servers and data centers. They have economies of scale in delivering content over the internet. Second is mindshare and data lock-in. Users log onto Facebook because other users are there. There are no examples at that scale of user divestment from a platform (in lieu of a major technological or social blunder, ala MySpace or Friendster). Just being 'better' than Facebook means diddly squat. I think it is still theoretically possible to be a 'better' search engine than Google, but they have plenty of other moats and momentum to stave that off. Don't kid yourself, these are certainly monopolies .

hibikir 9y ago

Every few days we have an article here in HN about a relatively big company, and people throw the classic comment that they don't understand how they need hundreds/thousands of programmers to do what they do, when the prototype of their website can be done by 2 people over a weekend. What you are doing is just a slightly more complex version of this, but the answer is still the same, scale. Software is easier to copy and replace than many other things, but make no mistake: The amount of engineering done at the largest software companies is massive, and has gone way past the point of being easy to replicate. Let's talk someone smaller, like Twitter. Building a Twitter for 100 people is trivial. Scaling it to work well for serious volumes, building all the pieces that make it have actual revenue, and not be just a giant money pit, and all the effort required to build the userbase itself is just enormous. When we go past Twitter, and we think Facebook and Google, serious disruption of their core businesses is really, really hard, because every single user they have is an efficiency you don't. In practice, every large software company today is running a whole lot of machine learning under the hood. Whether it's figuring out which ads to send you, just get you to stay on the site longer, or just have great fraud protection, the difference in data matters. Imagine your machine learning model is trying to sell ads. How much of a disadvantage are you in vs a company that is the user's default search engine, and has analytics hooks in the websites that your target person is on 75% of the time? What if they also have their text messages, know their friends, and their friends' purchases? You can have much better algorithms, but they have such an insane data advantage that you have to be orders of magnitude better to even compete with them! So I'd definitely bet highly on those services, because they've spent years building moats. That doesn't mean they are unbeatable: We all remember the time when Microsoft and IBM looked unbeatable, and we all know what happened, but I don't think anyone without massive funding and a completely new, must have product has a prayer of entering their space and not be swallowed whole.

marksomnian 9y ago
Exactly. You don't need all those people to make Twitter. You need all those people to make Twitter work at scale. Yes, technology does move easily, however if there's man-years of labour invested in making it work well at scale, it's suddenly a lot less movable.
alphydan 9y ago
Here's an idea: A team of coders in a basement combine lots of AI discoveries done by others (Think merging orthogonal approaches like Numenta + Google Brain + Vicarious + etc). With it, they crack the neo-cortex algorithm (or a rough approximation). It learns outdoors (cameras, actuators), indoors (talking), on the internet, in libraries, on wikipedia, etc. It becomes actually useful. Not: "OK, google set an alarm.", but: "Hey Peter, I'm really stuck with this problem, can you find a solution on SO. Oh, and send flower to my Aunt, you know ... the one who likes pink". If it was freely available I could see a massive migration of users abandoning google. Who needs google in such a context? -- far fetched, yes. But it is a scenario where the breakthrough is algorithmic rather than Huge-data based. The learning can then happens slowly (2 years undercover from that basement?), and emerge as a powerful intelligence and company.
- s73ver 9y ago
  And we have the same problem we have now. We've just changed the company.
  - PatentTroll 9y ago
    what is the end of this cycle? Does capitalism always tend toward innovation->monopoly->decline->disruption->innovation->monopoly .... ?
- p1esk 9y ago
  Yeah, maybe, but the coders able to "combine lots of AI discoveries done by others", as well as those who make those discoveries, are likely to work for Google/FB/MS/IBM/Apple/Amazon/etc already (or want to work there). A group like OpenAI also has a good chance to make a breakthrough, but you can hardly call them "a team of coders in a basement". It's unlikely that any a single company (even a large one) will have any significant advantage, because the research everyone does is highly public (everyone tries to publish asap). The research right now is at the stage where people are still looking which way to go, so as soon as someone stumbles upon a promising direction, everyone will jump on it (e.g. AlexNet success in 2012).

PatentTroll 9y ago

I disagree. First is the immense capital investment these companies have in physical servers and data centers. They have economies of scale in delivering content over the internet. Second is mindshare and data lock-in. Users log onto Facebook because other users are there. There are no examples at that scale of user divestment from a platform (in lieu of a major technological or social blunder, ala MySpace or Friendster). Just being 'better' than Facebook means diddly squat. I think it is still theoretically possible to be a 'better' search engine than Google, but they have plenty of other moats and momentum to stave that off. Don't kid yourself, these are certainly monopolies .