3 ms·
She sounds out of touch with reality. First of all, she is using the Microsoft example to justify breaking apart the companies, when Microsoft itself never got
by juanbyrge 7y ago
She sounds out of touch with reality. First of all, she is using the Microsoft example to justify breaking apart the companies, when Microsoft itself never got broken up. Microsoft’s mismanagement contributed more to their decline than any regulations.
I guarantee that if we wait 10 years the landscape for these big tech companies will be very different.
- rapsey 7y agoMS is extremely successful and if anything is soaring not declining.
- robjan 7y agoThis week Microsoft became the third company to be worth over a trillion US dollars. I don't think it's in decline.
- asaph 7y agoAt the time of this writing, at a $996.5B market cap, Microsoft is the biggest publicly traded company in the world.
- bennybob 7y agoYes but it did go into decline for a while until it reinvented itself. It's lost its dominance in OSs and web browsers. Government intervention didn't cause that, free markets did.
- asaph 7y agoMy point is that the article speaks of Microsoft in the past tense and focuses on breaking up "today's big tech" companies. Meanwhile Microsoft is bigger than all of them right now.
- gpsx 7y agoI was very surprised reading because I thought it sounded _somewhat_ reasonable when she was describing the problem. However her solution is very drastic. I don think we have any precedent for knowing how the market would respond to such heavy handed regulation. I would have to agree she is out of touch there.
- dvt 7y ago> I don think we have any precedent for knowing how the market would respond to such heavy handed regulation. Of course we do. See Northern Securities v. United States, Standard Oil v. United States, and the many other landmark antitrust cases. Let's not pretend this hasn't been an issue before.
- wincy 7y agoDid we have large international competition in those days? What sort of international competition might be the result of busting up Google? I really don’t want to go back to the bad old days of Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson making phone OSes. Would Alibaba be a better marketplace than Amazon if Amazon had separate companies, like if Amazon Essentials and AWS and Marketplace were distinct companies?
- gpsx 7y agoI agree there is a problem. And there would be precedent for breaking up a company. But she is going further than that. How about the definition of platform utilities for companies with annual global revenue of over $25 billion (see article for full details). There is more too, I won´t repeat the points of the article. I am pretty liberal but I think this kind of regulation is risky.
- Hydraulix989 7y agoShe also mistakenly claims that Google wouldn’t have emerged in the face of a Microsoft monopoly.