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Early tech investments are risky, but if your competition has tech 10 years more advanced than yours, there is probably no amount of money that would allow you
by fluffything 6y ago
Early tech investments are risky, but if your competition has tech 10 years more advanced than yours, there is probably no amount of money that would allow you to catch up, surpass, and make enough profits to recover the investment, mainly because you can't buy time, and your competitor won't stop to innovate, they are making a profit and you aren't, etc.
So to me the main realization here is that in tech, if one competitor ends up with tech that's 10 years more advanced than the competition, it is basically a divergence-type of phenomenon. It isn't worth it for the competition to even invest in trying to catch up, and you end up with a monopoly.
- lumost 6y agoThis is a good callout, unlike manufacturing the supply chain is almost universally vertically integrated for large software projects. While it's possible to make a kit car that at least some people would buy, most of the big tech companies have reached the point of requiring hundreds of engineers for years to compete. Caveat that time has shown that the monopolies tend to decay over time for various reasons, the tech world is littered with companies that grew too confident in their monopoly. - Cisco - Microsoft Windows - IBM etc.
- fluffything 6y agoThe problem with vertically integrated technology is that if a huge advancement appears at the lowest level of the stack that would require a whole re-implementation of the whole stack, a new startup building things from scratch can overthrown a large competitor that would need to "throw" their stack away, or evolve it without breaking backward compatibility, etc. Once you have put a lot of money into a product, it is very hard to start a new one from scratch and let the old one die.