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> Big tech firms have been known to intimidate startups into agreeing to a sale, saying that they will launch a competing service and put the startup out of bus
by oldgun 8y ago
> Big tech firms have been known to intimidate startups into agreeing to a sale, saying that they will launch a competing service and put the startup out of business unless they agree to a deal...
> Big tech firms are able to shell out huge sums to keep top performers and even average employees in their fold and make it uneconomical for their workers to consider joining startups.
Reminds me so much of the show Silicon Valley. A great satire!
- iteabagkevin2 8y agoDon’t those points sound great for startups and workers? 1) We will give you a large sum of money for your startup. 2) we will pay our workers so much they won’t want to do a startup.
- abdullahkhalids 8y agoThey do. The unstated statement by the GP is that what's good for an individual is not always good for society at large. Competition is good for society; monopoly is usually only good for the monopoly and those few who can threaten the monopoly but are happy to roll over for money.
- pjc50 8y agoThe sale in (1) is often on very unfavourable terms, because the valuation of a startup depends on whether the quasi-monopolist is trying to kill it or not. How much would your startup be worth if it was banned from the App Store, for example? 2) is fine .. unless there are secret no-poach agreements in place.
- Consultant32452 8y agoI have a hard time figuring out what to be angry about. One day we're upset at the evil capitalists for paying workers too little. Now I guess we're upset at the evil capitalists for paying people too much.
- orcdork 8y agoWhat about "evil capitalists" using their advantage unfairly to stifle & crush competition, keeping their profits high, while keeping salaries artificially deflated for the majority of workers. But ok, let's just create this fantastical narrative that "paying workers too little" and "paying people too much" cannot possibly apply at the same time to different segments of the population. Hell, let's even use the loaded phrase "evil capitalists", a great term if what we're looking for is to deftly avoid any real criticism of capitalism.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoYet us tech workers are some of the highest paid people in the world, and technological progress is advancing at a rate never before seen in human history. I guess the current system isn't so bad.
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago> technological progress is advancing at a rate never before seen in human history. I think over the last 20-30 years, the useful and helpful-to-society technological progress as a fraction of the technological industry is fairly low. Most of Silicon valley is figuring out how to extract as much ad value from consumers as possible; except for the single percentage renewable energy fraction, most of the advancements in the energy industry is a net negative for humans; medicine is stagnant because of the increase in complexity and economics; and the list goes on...
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago> Yet us tech workers are some of the highest paid people in the world ...and inequality is skyrocketing. > technological progress is advancing at a rate never before seen in human history. Compared to the growth between 1900 and 1950, we should have teleportation now. I'm not making a joke: life-changing progress keeps slowing down. E.g. refrigerators, washing machines, cars, airplanes, x-rays VS internet and smartphones. > I guess the current system isn't so bad. Compared to what? That's a false dichotomy fallacy.
- 8y ago
- softwaredoug 8y agoI’m not always convinced Google, Amazon, etc can start a product and compete in a new market and have it work 100% of the time. These companies have plenty of their own flops. Many things come to mind: google plus, amazons smart phones, MSs acquisition Skype... Certainly they have scale advantages, but there’s also diseconomies of scale that can work against them.
- dvtrn 8y agoI almost quipped that vacation rental marketplaces may be the exception but then I remembered Expedia acquired a bunch of them, including a former employer so there went that.
- intended 8y agoI think the issue here is not the advantages or disadvantages of their scale. Rather the chilling effect - the firms themselves (may be) slow to perceive the next iteration of consumer needs. Startups on the other hand figure them out - and build a product. The big fish/spiders, with their larger webs, sense the new upstarts and THEN build those features - and then go back to whatever it was that they were doing. The cycle then repeats.
- digi_owl 8y agoAs can be readily observed with the MS v Netscape battle over web tech (while called a browser war, my impression is that the browser was a proxy for getting a foothold in the server market). Never mind that MS had pulled something similar vs Novell some years prior, by bundling a client with Windows and then marketing their Exchange server as a drop in replacement for Novell's Netware. Just set up a NT box in the server room, configure the PCs, and phase out Netware.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago>>and have it work 100% of the time. These companies have plenty of their own flops. Many things come to mind: google plus, amazons smart phones, MSs acquisition Skype... when it's your startup it's 100%. But they don't need to score perfectly always. They can raise your costs by 100 fold if they want, and if they fail, so what, they try another thing. Time and time again and still have tens of billions in bank. The startup has 4-5 months of salaries, if lucky.
- EGreg 8y agoYeah I often joke I want to decline at least $6 Billion. (Following Facebook declining Yahoo’s $1.5B buyout offer and later Groupon declining $4B. Yeah our company’s that old.) Anyway I met the lawyer of the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, with one question: how can I prevent the tech giants from cloning my open source software, while the indie shops can? He said AGPL. That’s the poison pill you need for those big guys. “You just watch, we are gonna copy your open source software, roll it out it to our 1 billion users and release all the source code to everyone so they can build on top of it.. oh wait.” Yes! Do that! It will help everyone You see... an economic system of collaboration instead of competition eliminates a lot of these issues. The best architecture and code rises to the top instead of being killed off, and the profit motive isn't what drives progress.