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Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping mediocrity i

by geofft 8y ago

Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping mediocrity is more profitable than shipping excellence?

AlexB138 8y ago
In large part by exploiting government contracts, as I understand it. Government procurement is about as far from a free market as I can imagine, and is pretty easy to exploit.
vibrato 8y ago
Service contracts
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game. Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs". And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.
- geofft 8y ago
  Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
  - lordnacho 8y ago
    Not sure if you can call it "standard capitalist" but there are antitrust laws?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - foolrush 8y ago
    > Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government. In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
  - corodra 8y ago
    The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem. There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted. I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented. Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
    - greenshackle2 8y ago
      Uh? They switched from a JavaScript engine to a Relational Database Manager? Are you sure you don't mean a NoSQL DB rather than node.js? I googled a bit but couldn't find the article.
    - 8y ago
danso 8y ago
The "whole premise of capitalism" is that the economy and its profits are privately controlled. Whether that leads to building "useful things" for a country or the world is not a requirement.
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  The only way to make a profit in a privately controller economy is to show people that your things / services are so useful that they are willing to give you money for them. As a concrete example, for the last few years I have been donating to several fanfiction authors through Patreon because I want to encourage them to write more.
krapp 8y ago
>Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? No, the whole premise of capitalism is that people motivated by money will build things that make them money. It's right there in the name - "capital"-ism. Capital is the means, motive and end.
- geofft 8y ago
  So then it is not a morally defensible system, unless you believe the accumulation of wealth is inherently moral? It seems surprising that capitalism is so easy to argue against on moral grounds. Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it?
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    > Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it? It does seem that societies with generally capitalist systems flourish to a much greater degree than societies that are organized under any other dominant economic system.
    - dpkonofa 8y ago
      That really depends on what your definition of "flourish" is. The United States is really the only country that has "flourished" under a capitalist system and that's only if you define that through the definition of capitalism which is to say that there is more capital in the US than in other nations. Attributing that to capitalism, though, and not to years and years of industrial progress, human slavery, and, arguably, immoral behavior is somewhat naive, in my opinion.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        The contemporary competitors to the US with different economic fundamentals (China and the USSR primarily) also experienced/inflicted slavery, immoral behavior, and industrial progress, yet they didn't see nearly the same level of economic or societal development for the overwhelmingly vast majority of their population over their time of heavy-handed central planning economics. If you knew you'd be assigned at birth to a life of 10th to 90th percentile (by status/money/class) in a non-wartime country and it would be US, UK, USSR, or China and your birth year would be 1880, 1900, 1920, 1938, 1960, or 1980, how many would choose the USSR or China?
rongenre 8y ago
People motivated by money will figure out how to get people to give them money. That doesn't necessarily imply making a better product.
ionised 8y ago
> Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? I hope not because that seems hopelessly naive.
scrollaway 8y ago
You know how when you give an AI shallow directives in machine learning, it'll start doing weird things? Like that Roomba that got stuck permanently driving backwards, or the game AIs that figure out that standing still is the best way not to die. Well it works like that for capitalism too. People optimize for the goal (money), not necessarily the hopeful outcome (useful things).
daveFNbuck 8y ago
Mediocre things are useful. They can be much cheaper when you don't require excellence. The part of that quote that's more an indictment of capitalism is that they're inflicting misery and screwing their customers. That's what's not supposed to be profitable.

by geofft 8y ago

AlexB138 8y ago

In large part by exploiting government contracts, as I understand it. Government procurement is about as far from a free market as I can imagine, and is pretty easy to exploit.

vibrato 8y ago

Service contracts

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game. Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs". And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.

geofft 8y ago
Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  Not sure if you can call it "standard capitalist" but there are antitrust laws?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- foolrush 8y ago
  > Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government. In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
- corodra 8y ago
  The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem. There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted. I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented. Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
  - greenshackle2 8y ago
    Uh? They switched from a JavaScript engine to a Relational Database Manager? Are you sure you don't mean a NoSQL DB rather than node.js? I googled a bit but couldn't find the article.
  - 8y ago

danso 8y ago

The "whole premise of capitalism" is that the economy and its profits are privately controlled. Whether that leads to building "useful things" for a country or the world is not a requirement.

mdpopescu 8y ago
The only way to make a profit in a privately controller economy is to show people that your things / services are so useful that they are willing to give you money for them. As a concrete example, for the last few years I have been donating to several fanfiction authors through Patreon because I want to encourage them to write more.

krapp 8y ago

>Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? No, the whole premise of capitalism is that people motivated by money will build things that make them money. It's right there in the name - "capital"-ism. Capital is the means, motive and end.

geofft 8y ago
So then it is not a morally defensible system, unless you believe the accumulation of wealth is inherently moral? It seems surprising that capitalism is so easy to argue against on moral grounds. Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it?
- sokoloff 8y ago
  > Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it? It does seem that societies with generally capitalist systems flourish to a much greater degree than societies that are organized under any other dominant economic system.
  - dpkonofa 8y ago
    That really depends on what your definition of "flourish" is. The United States is really the only country that has "flourished" under a capitalist system and that's only if you define that through the definition of capitalism which is to say that there is more capital in the US than in other nations. Attributing that to capitalism, though, and not to years and years of industrial progress, human slavery, and, arguably, immoral behavior is somewhat naive, in my opinion.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      The contemporary competitors to the US with different economic fundamentals (China and the USSR primarily) also experienced/inflicted slavery, immoral behavior, and industrial progress, yet they didn't see nearly the same level of economic or societal development for the overwhelmingly vast majority of their population over their time of heavy-handed central planning economics. If you knew you'd be assigned at birth to a life of 10th to 90th percentile (by status/money/class) in a non-wartime country and it would be US, UK, USSR, or China and your birth year would be 1880, 1900, 1920, 1938, 1960, or 1980, how many would choose the USSR or China?

rongenre 8y ago

People motivated by money will figure out how to get people to give them money. That doesn't necessarily imply making a better product.

ionised 8y ago

> Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? I hope not because that seems hopelessly naive.

scrollaway 8y ago

You know how when you give an AI shallow directives in machine learning, it'll start doing weird things? Like that Roomba that got stuck permanently driving backwards, or the game AIs that figure out that standing still is the best way not to die. Well it works like that for capitalism too. People optimize for the goal (money), not necessarily the hopeful outcome (useful things).

daveFNbuck 8y ago

Mediocre things are useful. They can be much cheaper when you don't require excellence. The part of that quote that's more an indictment of capitalism is that they're inflicting misery and screwing their customers. That's what's not supposed to be profitable.