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Google/Amazon/Facebook have each served to stagnate tech, not push it forward. If you read their headlines, sure, you'll believe they're doing groundbreaking th

Google/Amazon/Facebook have each served to stagnate tech, not push it forward. If you read their headlines, sure, you'll believe they're doing groundbreaking things. But in reality, these behemoths have killed thousands of innovative startups to protect their cash cows. The uncommitted experiments they run, meanwhile, never amount to anything useful for the world. There were better social networks than Facebook, but they didn't make money the way Facebook does, so Facebook bought them and killed them. There were better online stores than Amazon, but they didn't abuse humans and play the same games Amazon does to succeed, so they died and it won. Tech monopolies are monopolies, and they're particularly aggressive ones. I also don't think you grasp the scope of tech monopolies. You cannot operate a business today without doing business with Google. You can hate Google, but you still have to do business with Google. Because if you aren't putting out Google Ads or at least optimizing your SEO for Google's bots, if you aren't launching your app in the Play Store, you're cutting off the majority of your customer base, and you're dying. Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google. Effing Comcast has to do business with Google. There has never been a monopoly on this planet that had more power and that was so unavoidable. And it doesn't take a lot of research to find places people are being hurt or having their livelihoods taken by the unholy beast that it's become.

papeda 7y ago
> Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google. Can you elaborate on this? Neither industry seems to rely on ads or SEO or app stores.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  You'd be surprised what you can find on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lmaeronautics.c130support https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lmaeronaut... Obviously healthcare providers market to consumers, medicines are marketed to consumers even when they're supposed to be prescribed by doctors, and of course, marketing healthcare wares to doctors is a pretty big deal. But ask yourself how healthcare companies and defense contractors market themselves, find new talent, even lobby. (Targeting advertising can literally shove ads just in the face of people in federal government buildings.) Google has the eyes of well over 80% of the global population. Which means if you want to talk to... pretty much any group of people, you likely have to do it through Google.
jondubois 7y ago
This is very well put. I've worked in tech for both startups and corporations. I've moved around a lot and I've come to the same conclusion. The effects of tech monopolies are particularly obvious to those who work in open source. For example, it's extremely common to find that some very expensive third-party services have free open source alternatives available - These open source communities are often struggling to stay alive. Big tech corporations hire thousands of engineers in-house and so it would cost them nothing extra to use the open source solution (they already have the engineering capacity to implement and manage it). But they won't! They will happily pay millions of dollars of fees annually to get something that they could have gotten for free and maybe paid an optional $20K per year 'tech support' fee to the open source community. Not only that, but their system would be way more flexible because the corporation would have full control over the open source code and their own data. For example, the $400 million that Facebook spent on acquiring Giphy could have been saved if they had used an open source solution instead. Heck, they could have built Giphy themselves from the ground up in a couple of months using open source solutions for very little additional engineering cost. Corporations have no incentives to be efficient; instead they will use some expensive provider because the CEOs of both companies are friends. They have a monopoly so they can afford to be very wasteful.

papeda 7y ago

> Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google. Can you elaborate on this? Neither industry seems to rely on ads or SEO or app stores.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
You'd be surprised what you can find on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lmaeronautics.c130support https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lmaeronaut... Obviously healthcare providers market to consumers, medicines are marketed to consumers even when they're supposed to be prescribed by doctors, and of course, marketing healthcare wares to doctors is a pretty big deal. But ask yourself how healthcare companies and defense contractors market themselves, find new talent, even lobby. (Targeting advertising can literally shove ads just in the face of people in federal government buildings.) Google has the eyes of well over 80% of the global population. Which means if you want to talk to... pretty much any group of people, you likely have to do it through Google.

jondubois 7y ago

This is very well put. I've worked in tech for both startups and corporations. I've moved around a lot and I've come to the same conclusion. The effects of tech monopolies are particularly obvious to those who work in open source. For example, it's extremely common to find that some very expensive third-party services have free open source alternatives available - These open source communities are often struggling to stay alive. Big tech corporations hire thousands of engineers in-house and so it would cost them nothing extra to use the open source solution (they already have the engineering capacity to implement and manage it). But they won't! They will happily pay millions of dollars of fees annually to get something that they could have gotten for free and maybe paid an optional $20K per year 'tech support' fee to the open source community. Not only that, but their system would be way more flexible because the corporation would have full control over the open source code and their own data. For example, the $400 million that Facebook spent on acquiring Giphy could have been saved if they had used an open source solution instead. Heck, they could have built Giphy themselves from the ground up in a couple of months using open source solutions for very little additional engineering cost. Corporations have no incentives to be efficient; instead they will use some expensive provider because the CEOs of both companies are friends. They have a monopoly so they can afford to be very wasteful.