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A better recent tweet by Chamath[1]: > BigTech has a huge yearly R&D budget. In fact, with two years’ worth of R&D, BigTech could recreate the Apollo program.
by paulsutter 6y ago
A better recent tweet by Chamath[1]:
> BigTech has a huge yearly R&D budget. In fact, with two years’ worth of R&D, BigTech could recreate the Apollo program. But they haven’t. Why? Incumbency’s biggest drawbacks are lack of creativity, sloth, internecine politics and waste.
[1] https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1281630459286286336 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1281630459286286336
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThey haven't because they don't want to compete with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who are both working on it. (It's been longer than two years, granted, but they also have more involved goals than just landing and flying away.)
- nabla9 6y agoBig Tech buys innovation and shuts it down or absorbs it. Think for example all Alphabet products that came from acquisitions: Youtube, Picasa, Android, DoubleClick, reCAPTCHA, ITA Software, SageTV, Meebo, Waze,DeepMind, Fitbit... They have also bought something like 50 ad tech companies and 20-30 web search companies.
- jeswin 6y ago> BigTech has a huge yearly R&D budget. In fact, with two years’ worth of R&D, BigTech could recreate the Apollo program. Why? One could argue that advances in AI and Quantum Computing are at least as significant as landing on the moon, and of more value. Big tech investment has pushed the field forward significantly.
- compiler-guy 6y agoThey haven’t built the Apollo program or anything like it because the profits available there are. It large compared to other places.
- izacus 6y agoNeither did Shell, Apple, Walmart or any of the other of hundreds of ultra-rich corporations. Which tells more about the Apollo program (and it's rather rapid cancellation before even finishing all the flights) than about those corporations. How can we trust economic judgement from someone who uses a project which was only approved due to political grandstanding, as an example of successful corporate direction? If anything, FB and GOOG will be strengthened by US economic protectionism and assault on China. They just have to continue navigating the political mindefield outside the US markets.
- nojito 6y agoApple making the iPhone changed an entire decade.
- izacus 6y agoWhat exactly does your sentence actually rebuke?
- scarface74 6y agoI have one of each of Apple’s categories. But let’s be honest, Microsoft and Google have done more to bring technology to the masses than Apple has. Most of the world’s population either can’t or won’t pay Apple’s prices. Apple is never going to make a $25 smart phone like you can get in India.
- adfigninio 6y agoI still don't understand why people care so much about the iPhone. It's a bad computer that fits in your pocket. We've had PDAs for going on thirty years. Sure, it was a good PDA, but I have no idea how anyone can consider it revolutionary. "Consumer" tech hasn't improved at all in my estimation since about 2002. The hardware has gotten better and the software has gotten more bloated, but a modern gadget can do roughly zero things that a gadget from 2002 couldn't.
- arnaudsm 6y agoI agree a lot on the increasingly bloated software. Even if Moore's law dies, we still have >20 years of software improvement to do !