4 ms·

Below is a link to a list of mergers and acquisitions by Google over the last twenty years, many of them were search engines and online portals. This is the typ

Below is a link to a list of mergers and acquisitions by Google over the last twenty years, many of them were search engines and online portals. This is the type of thing that the Antitrust Laws were meant to prevent. However laws are only as good as the government's willingness to exercise them. Hopefully this signals the end of the second Gilded Age, and a return to the creative destruction that has made the USA's economy the strongest in the world for almost a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

shadowgovt 6y ago
Not a fan of creative destruction in the software sphere, personally. In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car. What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful? Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.
- riazrizvi 6y ago
  Without creative destruction in software, there is no Linux, there is no GCC. So no Apple macOS, all PC's run Windows, and likely there is no iOS/iPhone. Microsoft would also [1] own the internet. Their browser IE would be the only significant consumer share, there would be no Mozilla, no open source browser. So no incentive to open the browser up to plugins. Microsoft would hold all the information on consumer browsing habits. Would they permit other search engines? Unlikely if there is no antitrust regulation compelling them to do so. But that was then. I think your premise is, we more or less have all the software technology we need why do more, unless it comes from an incumbent, in the form of incremental improvements? Why shouldn't Apple, Google, Microsoft shut down their app stores a little more? Keep the development in-house. What's the point of allowing this creative destruction from 3rd parties? More and more, we only get these increasingly tired, corporate innovations. Fewer ports on computers in the name of locking down devices to make them less 'hackable', more restrictions on these OS that increasingly feel like sandboxes, because why bother giving users the unfettered ability to create stuff, it just allows more creative destruction. Why should corporations knock it out of the park when they can just suppress upstarts with unfair competition? By the way, antitrust regulation also prevents [2] Apple, Google, Adobe etc suppressing developer salaries. Remember antitrust law also shares incentives and motivation, to encourage progress. But the better question is what is the future without without creative destruction, without shared incentives and competition? We have the answer in thousands of years of monarchies. Monarchies are a stagnant form of human development, they have no incentivize to upset their current order so they constantly suppress change. We don't celebrate this ancient monarchy or that one, like we do federated political systems. Compare the cultural developments in ancient Greece's federated city states vs surrounding empires. Or the Roman Empire, when it was ruled by the Senate, before emperors ran it into the ground. Or the Gutenberg Press, that brought printing to the European states where publishers were incentivized by profit, compared to dynastic China that developed the technology hundreds of years before, which helped trigger the Renaissance. Or Britain after the Glorious Revolution broke the monarchy's monopolies and led to the Industrial Age. Or the Jamestown settlement after it began profit sharing to motivate the colonists, in the face of failure, which directly lead to the political institutions which created the United States of America. Without power sharing, all civilizations degrade into inheritance systems, where opportunity is few and far between, unless you go rogue. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-microsoft-google-aol-monopoly-lawsuits-history https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-m... [2] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-0 https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-0
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I was pulling a salary from one of those companies when that lawsuit went through about wage suppression, and I can tell you, my wage sure didn't feel suppressed. Always felt a little gross to me that people who make six figures would claim their wages were being held down. It's not like anyone who felt they were underpaid or underappreciated didn't know where the other companies were. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and cashed my check for being apparently a part of an oppressed class, but at the end of the day very little changed and the biggest beneficiaries of the entire exercise were the lawyers who got the lion's share of the suit money. On the topic of monarchies, there was plenty of creative destruction during the monarchy era. Territories and kingdoms were constantly being built, defended, fought over, carved up, destroyed, and rebuilt. Not all churn is good churn. I'm certainly not against new companies innovating and creating new things. But I'm not sure in the specific space of software engineering, we need the heavy hand of government cracking up a successful company to enable creation of good things. I don't think the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit was a good idea, and it looks like history has borne that out; Apple got themselves out of their own hole by finding another operating system route separate from Windows and rearchitecting themselves on top of it, and Mozilla would always have had a home on Linux that Windows couldn't touch one way or the other. In the long run, all the lawsuit really seems to have done is force Microsoft into a back seat in they have arbitrary restrictions on the way they are allowed to combine their browser and operating system resources, and who benefits from that? Chrome has written an OS and a browser combined, why isn't Microsoft allowed to? Better software tends to speak for itself. Do we trust government to make these decisions for the people who understand the technology and the people who use it?
- bawolff 6y ago
  Everyone making a bespoke api is not the same as someone making a better car. Key word is "better" The issue is that a lot of people talk up "innovation" in the tech industry, that isn't. For every person who makes a better car, lots of people make the same or worse cars. As a random example, which format would you rather have your api serialization format be in: ASN, XML or Json? I for one am glad that innovation made ASN and XML go away.
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    > As a random example, which format would you rather have your api serialization format be in: ASN, XML or Json? I for one am glad that innovation made ASN and XML go away. ha, obvs protobuffers. [hides from thrown tomatoes]

shadowgovt 6y ago

Not a fan of creative destruction in the software sphere, personally. In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car. What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful? Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.

riazrizvi 6y ago
Without creative destruction in software, there is no Linux, there is no GCC. So no Apple macOS, all PC's run Windows, and likely there is no iOS/iPhone. Microsoft would also [1] own the internet. Their browser IE would be the only significant consumer share, there would be no Mozilla, no open source browser. So no incentive to open the browser up to plugins. Microsoft would hold all the information on consumer browsing habits. Would they permit other search engines? Unlikely if there is no antitrust regulation compelling them to do so. But that was then. I think your premise is, we more or less have all the software technology we need why do more, unless it comes from an incumbent, in the form of incremental improvements? Why shouldn't Apple, Google, Microsoft shut down their app stores a little more? Keep the development in-house. What's the point of allowing this creative destruction from 3rd parties? More and more, we only get these increasingly tired, corporate innovations. Fewer ports on computers in the name of locking down devices to make them less 'hackable', more restrictions on these OS that increasingly feel like sandboxes, because why bother giving users the unfettered ability to create stuff, it just allows more creative destruction. Why should corporations knock it out of the park when they can just suppress upstarts with unfair competition? By the way, antitrust regulation also prevents [2] Apple, Google, Adobe etc suppressing developer salaries. Remember antitrust law also shares incentives and motivation, to encourage progress. But the better question is what is the future without without creative destruction, without shared incentives and competition? We have the answer in thousands of years of monarchies. Monarchies are a stagnant form of human development, they have no incentivize to upset their current order so they constantly suppress change. We don't celebrate this ancient monarchy or that one, like we do federated political systems. Compare the cultural developments in ancient Greece's federated city states vs surrounding empires. Or the Roman Empire, when it was ruled by the Senate, before emperors ran it into the ground. Or the Gutenberg Press, that brought printing to the European states where publishers were incentivized by profit, compared to dynastic China that developed the technology hundreds of years before, which helped trigger the Renaissance. Or Britain after the Glorious Revolution broke the monarchy's monopolies and led to the Industrial Age. Or the Jamestown settlement after it began profit sharing to motivate the colonists, in the face of failure, which directly lead to the political institutions which created the United States of America. Without power sharing, all civilizations degrade into inheritance systems, where opportunity is few and far between, unless you go rogue. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-microsoft-google-aol-monopoly-lawsuits-history https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-m... [2] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-0 https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-0
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I was pulling a salary from one of those companies when that lawsuit went through about wage suppression, and I can tell you, my wage sure didn't feel suppressed. Always felt a little gross to me that people who make six figures would claim their wages were being held down. It's not like anyone who felt they were underpaid or underappreciated didn't know where the other companies were. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and cashed my check for being apparently a part of an oppressed class, but at the end of the day very little changed and the biggest beneficiaries of the entire exercise were the lawyers who got the lion's share of the suit money. On the topic of monarchies, there was plenty of creative destruction during the monarchy era. Territories and kingdoms were constantly being built, defended, fought over, carved up, destroyed, and rebuilt. Not all churn is good churn. I'm certainly not against new companies innovating and creating new things. But I'm not sure in the specific space of software engineering, we need the heavy hand of government cracking up a successful company to enable creation of good things. I don't think the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit was a good idea, and it looks like history has borne that out; Apple got themselves out of their own hole by finding another operating system route separate from Windows and rearchitecting themselves on top of it, and Mozilla would always have had a home on Linux that Windows couldn't touch one way or the other. In the long run, all the lawsuit really seems to have done is force Microsoft into a back seat in they have arbitrary restrictions on the way they are allowed to combine their browser and operating system resources, and who benefits from that? Chrome has written an OS and a browser combined, why isn't Microsoft allowed to? Better software tends to speak for itself. Do we trust government to make these decisions for the people who understand the technology and the people who use it?
bawolff 6y ago
Everyone making a bespoke api is not the same as someone making a better car. Key word is "better" The issue is that a lot of people talk up "innovation" in the tech industry, that isn't. For every person who makes a better car, lots of people make the same or worse cars. As a random example, which format would you rather have your api serialization format be in: ASN, XML or Json? I for one am glad that innovation made ASN and XML go away.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  > As a random example, which format would you rather have your api serialization format be in: ASN, XML or Json? I for one am glad that innovation made ASN and XML go away. ha, obvs protobuffers. [hides from thrown tomatoes]