10 ms·

I was at MS in the late 90s, left in 2000. It should have been broken up then. But to break up or be broken up is the wrong phrasing. It connotes a kind of des

I was at MS in the late 90s, left in 2000. It should have been broken up then. But to break up or be broken up is the wrong phrasing. It connotes a kind of destruction, to make something less than it was, but this is not the case at all. Any value that something this large has, is in its ability to exhaust resources from the ecosystem, control the market, the workers and the ability to resist changing its behavior when better things come along. Companies exist in a system that should serve everyone and when an imbalance occurs the whole system morphs around them. They are no longer players but dictators, willingly or not. Their sheer size forces rules of the game in ways even they do not control. Breaking up large companies isn't even about them. It is about us and the world we want to live in. Remember the wage fixing scandal between Pixar, Google, Apple and bunch of other companies in the bay? [1] They ultimately controlled where those people worked (and their horrible commutes), who they were friends with, what schools their kids went to and who they married. All because the execs at these companies wanted to maintain total control of the workforce and suppress wages. That is too much power for a company to have or wield. And these large companies due to their size alone are doing this on an unconscious level. On a conscious level they can do much worse. Microsoft stagnated for what 10-15 years? But it isn't just MS that is stagnating, it is all the people in those markets. There were a bunch of us WITHIN the company that wanted the divisions repotted so each could grow on its own. If value is being lost when an organization that large is distributed to a smaller number of units, then the value is selfish, it only serves the org and not the system it operates in. What is the end state if we let this continue? 20 large corporations in America and a field of small feeder gig economy vendors? We will all be serfs (NPCs) in a feudal corporate cosplay. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/01/20/doj_emails_anti_poaching_deals/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/01/20/doj_emails_anti_poach...

whimsicalism 6y ago
> What is the end state if we let this continue? 20 large corporations in America and a field of small feeder gig economy vendors? We will all be serfs (NPCs) in a feudal corporate cosplay. The reality is that this is what we're moving to, break-up or not. The ownership of these publicly traded companies remains the same disparate set of high-capitalization funds.
- switch11 6y ago
  very true People don't seem to realize that sooner or later EVERYONE will be under attack from this sort of '10 large companies that own everything' model They seem to think - Oh my job is safe, so what do I care if taxi drivers/waiters/delivery people/warehouse workers have a tough life sooner or later you will be a target, and then you will wish you had not ignored when everyone else was being taken out because there will be no one left to save your job
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Definitely there is a problem with people not realizing the oligopoly problem. That said, I'm not as confident that changing public perception will actually have any impact on what the law does. There is pretty compelling evidence that in cases where public opinion and the opinion of large capital holders diverge w.r.t. a law, there is no relationship between the public opinion and what law is actually passed. [0] [0]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
  - cryptica 6y ago
    Very well put. The game is about concentrating wealth into as few hands as possible. If we allow it to continue in that direction, it will keep getting worse and accelerate. If we allow the economic elite to have their way and we turn a blind eye to their manipulations, it will be a signal for them to dial up the manipulations even more. If you are not sufficiently connected to the financial and political elite, you will eventually lose everything. It will happen in your lifetime. Nobody will be left to protect you against gross injustice. Worse than that; nobody will care. We all have to take a stand and make a small effort at least. Already, highly intelligent people are beginning to fall through the cracks of the system by the millions.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Thats why i m already hoarding Brawndo stocks.
shadowgovt 6y ago
> They ultimately controlled where those people worked [citation needed]. I was a "victim" of that scandal, but if I ever decided to change employers I knew where the door was and I knew my résumé would get me considered at the other players. The agreement was mostly to keep their phone bank of recruiters from polling me continuously and the managers like four levels above me from playing pachinko with the pay and benefits packages (to the detriment of the folks at my level). Regardless, the agreement was illegal and existing law broke it up without breaking up any of the companies. I don't see how the existence of that scandal supports the hypothesis that larger corporate breakups are either needed or beneficial. Microsoft of today is an OS company, browser company, videogame development company, and cloud computing company, and they seem to be doing pretty well overall at it; happy users, good products, decent inter-operation.
- seg_lol 6y ago
  There is a lot to unpack here, but I think it needs to be addressed since your comment is getting so much exposure. >> They ultimately controlled where those people worked This is entire point of the anti-solicitation agreement. I don't need to cite anything. Read the transcripts from Jobs and tell me again how it was to protect you from recruiters. How did you get sufficient protection after they lost the suit? The point is showing the behavior of large companies that wield too much power and control large portions of the market, either from the customer's standpoint or the employees. They stopped their behavior only after being sued by the employees, who gained very little, the lawyers won and the GAFS ultimately profited from this endeavor. Microsoft today is immaterial to the MS that should have been replanted in the 90s. Does not follow. BTW it is hard to respond when your post is continually ninja-edited.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    > Microsoft today is immaterial to the MS that should have been replanted in the 90s. Does not follow. Microsoft of today follows from the MS that wasn't replaced in the '90s. Of course it's material.
    - 6y ago
matthoiland 6y ago
> We will all be serfs (NPCs) in a feudal corporate cosplay. Perfect.
jariel 6y ago
Great statement, excellent articulation. " isn't even about them. It is about us and the world we want to live in. " ... we have to recognize that 'we don't own this stuff'. Yes - I do support anti-trust and possibly 'breaking up companies' but we have to be very, very careful at how we intercede into private groups affairs. The agents doing the 'breaking up' might just believe that they have incredible ability to 'oversee markets' and leverage the power for what they believe to be the 'greater good'. The power of 'free markets' is often overstated but we should remind ourselves that there is a lot of value there, more importantly it's not obvious. In the short run, it's easy for someone to delude themselves in to the view that 'one's responsibility to the ostensible greater good as governor' combined with 'the grand view of markets' should legitimately empower towards control and market manipulation. After all - a bunch of 'really smart analysts' should be able to maximize social utility through some kind of restructuring of whatever exists at any given time in the markets. It's a vey slippery slope and a hard thing to 'get right' - so any gains to be made here are going to be really correlated with how thoughtful and intelligent government will be on this one. Even with the greatest intentions it could be a mess. Whoever doing this needs to be really, really smart about it.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > private groups affairs. No such thing. They are relying on societal assurances that contracts they enter will be enforced, that property they hold will be protected, etc. Society is free to regulate those "private group affairs" since they are externalizing the costs onto society. > there is a lot of value there, more importantly it's not obvious Sure, but generally in the cases where politicians mistakenly intervene in markets with distortionary effects, economists are pretty united that the intervention will be a bad idea (see: rent control). On anti-trust, economists recognize monopolies as a pretty clear market failure and it seems to be the tech employees who are deploying the "free market" arguments in defense of Google, FB, et al.
  - jariel 6y ago
    " Society is free to regulate those "private group affairs" since they are externalizing the costs onto society." Private property, freedom of association is a very real thing. It's a very serious thing to take private people's stuff from them. So we have to be careful.
fiftyfifty 6y ago
This is a good point, there is more to antitrust laws than just economics, they were put in place to protect our democratic republic. Senator John Sherman is quoted: "If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life." The Sherman Antitrust Act is the foundation of modern antitrust law.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I think this gets to the heart of the difference between republicanism and liberalism (the ideologies, not the political parties).
- swebs 6y ago
  Let's add "communicate" to that. It's crazy how much of the world's communication is controlled by a few guys in Silicon Valley and their arbitrary ToS.
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    But you have such a large number of choices for communication: Meet, Hangouts, Allo, Messages, Duo, Skype, Lync, Skype for Business, and Teams.
    - fouric 6y ago
      Those are all controlled by three companies, at most: Google (Meet, Hangouts, Allo, Duo), Microsoft (Lync, Skype, Skype for Business, Teams), and whatever company controls "Messages".
    - strombofulous 6y ago
      Yeah and all of them will ban if you say the wrong thing
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      Lync is "Skype for Business" now, afaik. And I think communication is one of the more open stacks. WebEx? Zoom? Slack? WeChat?
srtjstjsj 6y ago
> They ultimately controlled where those people worked (and their horrible commutes), who they were friends with, what schools their kids went to and who they married. All because the execs at these companies wanted to maintain total control of the workforce and suppress wages. This is ridiculous. It was a non-recruitment pact that led to lower pay (for already wealthy people, just not as wealthy ad that execs), not wage-fixing nor non-hiring nor control over where people live or went to school or who they marry. And the insulation that the wealthiest 1% of people are entitled to send their child to a better school than their non-tech-star neighbors is horrific. It exposes a worldview that extreme inequality is only bad if you aren't on top > NPCs What does this even mean? Being poorly paid and not having healthcare is bad, but being an "NPC" has nothing to do with it. How is being employed as a driver/cook/whatever more of a "PC"?
- j4nt4b 6y ago
  I think by NPC the parent meant a total lack of agency/mobility, perhaps comparable to feudal serfdom. Sure, you have a means of sustaining yourself, but if any job you can take or business you can create all involve a kickback to a monopolistic tech company, then your existence tends to serve their interests more than yours.
acituan 6y ago
> Any value that something this large has, is in its ability to exhaust resources from the ecosystem, control the market, the workers and the ability to resist changing its behavior when better things come along. It is no news that big-co can induce great harm, but let us not get swallowed into conspiratorial thinking. Large companies first and foremost benefit from economies of scale, not any dictatorial dynamics they might pursue. This is important, because when we decide to draw a line based on size (easy) and not on demonstrated harmful behavior (difficult), we have to answer the question "how big exactly we should allow corporations get then?". The answer to this question will determine if we as a society can enjoy certain things or not, because some goods' and services' existence requires that economies of scale. > Breaking up large companies isn't even about them. It is about us and the world we want to live in. Remember the wage fixing scandal between Pixar, Google, Apple and bunch of other companies in the bay? How is multiple companies colluding related to the question of a single company being broken up? Again, what they did was wrong, but let's not smuggle unnecessary emotional rhetoric into a rational argument. > That is too much power for a company to have or wield. Power concentrates whether we like it or not. Who should wield that power? Nation states? Religions? Or do we mandate a constant break up? You might break up your nation's companies but that doesn't prevent another country's corporations dominating the world market including yours, unless you pull a NK. Yes corporate power concentration can/does cause great harm, but I haven't heard a suggestion that can actually work in the real world. How about strengthening the opponent process of government and other democratic processes to undertake the difficult task of disincentivizing demonstrated harmful behavior? Developing mechanisms more sophisticated than "just break it up"? American big-co's are not the only big-co's in the world, maybe compare notes with how other nations handling these?
- thomasz 6y ago
  Being able to significantly alter public perception and influence the political process is one of the most important advantages of scale.
  - acituan 6y ago
    Yes, and maybe our political and public perception apparatus doesn’t scale well to the long tail of public interest topics and a singular strong entity with clear goals is simply taking advantage of that mismatch.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tomjen3 6y ago
How would you have broken up MS? The Office programs are better together, Windows might be split of from the rest, but then what about IE? You can't sell a browser anymore, so either that dies (which would be bad back then because it was the most advanced browser) or it gets bundled with something else and the problem continues.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- GordonS 6y ago
  I'd keep all the software together - Windows, Office, CRM, etc. Spinning out Bing/Microsoft Ads and Azure as separate companies feels kind of obvious, and could be interesting. I'm sure Azure could easily stand on it's own (might even be beneficial?!), but I wonder about the financial dependencies between Ads and Windows?
dmos62 6y ago
Thank you for painting such a memorable picture. Too often we retreat to abstract intellectual arguments about what's right or how the world works. We have to remember that these decisions are about our wellbeing, as industry workers, consumers and the ecosystem as a whole.
Barrin92 6y ago
>Any value that something this large has, is in its ability to exhaust resources from the ecosystem, control the market, the workers and the ability to resist changing its behavior when better things come along. Companies exist in a system that should serve everyone and when an imbalance occurs the whole system morphs around them. They are no longer players but dictators, willingly or not. Their sheer size forces rules of the game in ways even they do not control. This isn't really the whole story. Large firms don't just exist because of power, but also because to manage an increasingly complex environment (scientifically, economically etc) large institutions are required to hold the necessary knowledge to function effectively. The concentration towards larger firms is thus not just a power grab, but a necessary condition for modern production. This was Schumpeter's basic insight. Monopolistic competition is more dynamic than the free, small-firm dominated market. Size gives companies the ability to earn surplus profit which is turned into long-term innovation rather than short-term fighting for market share. The central dynamic around data collection in the information economy even amplifies that trend. Smaller firms are not going to reap benefits on the same scale as large firms can, and the primary economic case for break ups, which is that large firms are unproductive due to being unable to deal with complexity, has been turned on its head. Information now functions as a way to make centralisation more efficient, not less.
- koluna 6y ago
  _ Monopolistic competition is more dynamic than the free, small-firm dominated market. Size gives companies the ability to earn surplus profit which is turned into long-term innovation rather than short-term fighting for market share._ Ah yes, this good ol’ myth. To debunk it, look around you at all the major players in tech who are hoarding cash like there is no tomorrow while doing incremental improvements to products rather than building something interesting. The larger a company becomes, the more bloated and bureaucratic it becomes. Once they’re big enough, innovation is close to impossible, and the self-preservation instinct kicks in. Again, you can see that in almost all BigTech players today.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    What I can see, literally, by looking around is that my phone is made by Huawei, my TV by Samsung, my medicine is made by a large pharmaceutical company, the train I take to work and the rail network are built by a state owned company, the web framework I used yesterday is made by a colossal tech giant, so is the text editor I use (granted that one may vary), and the cloud infrastructure my software runs on. So are the cars on the sideways looking out of the window. All big firms. Large firms are quite literally who built all the complicated stuff at huge scale that pretty much everyone relies on all the time. I actually have to search around before I find something that was made by a small business. And that's not because of some conspiracy, it's because they happen to make the best stuff cheap, which is a consequence of their scale. It's not a myth, you can literally confirm that by I suppose checking who makes the stuff you voluntarily buy each day.
unixhero 6y ago
Very insightful comment. I also focus on the element of the world we want to live in, and whether the status quo or where we are heading is really it.
lowdose 6y ago
They get this big by buying up that many successful startups. I don't know about microsoft because it was for my time but Amazon bought Kiva Systems and now it is called Amazon Robotics. This ensures Amazon is the only company able to extract value from Kiva's robotics. Their robots drive the inventory around in fulfillment centers where order get picked on a rate of 300 per hour. Because they had a double frog leap on the competition Kivy would probably have IPOed by now. All of the technology companies have a specialized VC arm which rake up extraordinary talent before they become a competitor. Whatsapp was build with 12 engineers when they hit 1 billion users. FANG have a talent kartel.
closeparen 6y ago
Even with the price fixing scandal, TC is still much higher at the big corps than at small companies, isn’t it? Seems like the monopolistic largesse outweighs the competition factor, at least for tech work. The economics are different in other ways too: a big company hires someone who’s good at CS fundamentals and gives them time to learn whatever stack, while a small one needs someone with experience in exactly the right version of a framework. A big company can hire people for long term R&D while a small one needs features right now. It may be best for the economy that the spoils of monopoly be redistributed, but we are partly the beneficiaries of them.
gen220 6y ago
This is a great take. > What is the end state if we let this continue? One of the pillars of capitalism is the idea of "creative destruction" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall). That is, when a moderately-sized company falls apart, it's actually a long-term positive for the economy as a whole. It's decomposed, sold off, and its former pieces are repurposed for the good of all. One purpose of antitrust law is to keep the cycle of whale falls going. If antitrust law is unenforced, the whales never fall, which has a negative impact on the fragility of our economy: if and when these megacorps become anemic, they threaten to take down the whole economy/whale-decomposition process with them.
austincheney 6y ago
Microsoft stagnated only because of leadership executing on a weak vision. Microsoft was at war with open source under a mantra of make the world Microsoft and their market didn’t care. It’s like Microsoft was executing from the same playbook as Apple before Apple discovered media licensing even though Microsoft was 20x larger. Outdated vision. By embracing the opposite approach they turned things around.
subsubzero 6y ago
Break them up! The recent jump in engineers pay the past few years can be attributed to stopping this conduct by the large players: >Remember the wage fixing scandal between Pixar, Google, Apple and bunch of other companies in the bay? In addition when it comes to monopolies I always think of the Snapchat situation where a healthy, dynamic company comes up with a creative feature(stories) only to have the monopoly that is facebook completely rip it off and copy it in their own products thereby depressing snapchat's stock price and siphoning off its users. The fact that pinterest, twitter, and snapchat are not $100B+ companies and thriving is almost wholly due to facebook and its illegal monopolistic practices.
m463 6y ago
My thoughts on this: - Microsoft stagnated or reversed computer software in many ways during the 80's and 90's. How long did we go without multitasking? (on the other hand, it was solely responsible for the commoditization of hardware which gave us countless benefits) - being an employee in a company with robust competition is the best. (also for customers) Working in a company that is either too dominant or weak is an easy way to a job that lacks meaning.

whimsicalism 6y ago

> What is the end state if we let this continue? 20 large corporations in America and a field of small feeder gig economy vendors? We will all be serfs (NPCs) in a feudal corporate cosplay. The reality is that this is what we're moving to, break-up or not. The ownership of these publicly traded companies remains the same disparate set of high-capitalization funds.

switch11 6y ago
very true People don't seem to realize that sooner or later EVERYONE will be under attack from this sort of '10 large companies that own everything' model They seem to think - Oh my job is safe, so what do I care if taxi drivers/waiters/delivery people/warehouse workers have a tough life sooner or later you will be a target, and then you will wish you had not ignored when everyone else was being taken out because there will be no one left to save your job
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Definitely there is a problem with people not realizing the oligopoly problem. That said, I'm not as confident that changing public perception will actually have any impact on what the law does. There is pretty compelling evidence that in cases where public opinion and the opinion of large capital holders diverge w.r.t. a law, there is no relationship between the public opinion and what law is actually passed. [0] [0]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
- cryptica 6y ago
  Very well put. The game is about concentrating wealth into as few hands as possible. If we allow it to continue in that direction, it will keep getting worse and accelerate. If we allow the economic elite to have their way and we turn a blind eye to their manipulations, it will be a signal for them to dial up the manipulations even more. If you are not sufficiently connected to the financial and political elite, you will eventually lose everything. It will happen in your lifetime. Nobody will be left to protect you against gross injustice. Worse than that; nobody will care. We all have to take a stand and make a small effort at least. Already, highly intelligent people are beginning to fall through the cracks of the system by the millions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cblconfederate 6y ago
Thats why i m already hoarding Brawndo stocks.

shadowgovt 6y ago

> They ultimately controlled where those people worked [citation needed]. I was a "victim" of that scandal, but if I ever decided to change employers I knew where the door was and I knew my résumé would get me considered at the other players. The agreement was mostly to keep their phone bank of recruiters from polling me continuously and the managers like four levels above me from playing pachinko with the pay and benefits packages (to the detriment of the folks at my level). Regardless, the agreement was illegal and existing law broke it up without breaking up any of the companies. I don't see how the existence of that scandal supports the hypothesis that larger corporate breakups are either needed or beneficial. Microsoft of today is an OS company, browser company, videogame development company, and cloud computing company, and they seem to be doing pretty well overall at it; happy users, good products, decent inter-operation.

seg_lol 6y ago
There is a lot to unpack here, but I think it needs to be addressed since your comment is getting so much exposure. >> They ultimately controlled where those people worked This is entire point of the anti-solicitation agreement. I don't need to cite anything. Read the transcripts from Jobs and tell me again how it was to protect you from recruiters. How did you get sufficient protection after they lost the suit? The point is showing the behavior of large companies that wield too much power and control large portions of the market, either from the customer's standpoint or the employees. They stopped their behavior only after being sued by the employees, who gained very little, the lawyers won and the GAFS ultimately profited from this endeavor. Microsoft today is immaterial to the MS that should have been replanted in the 90s. Does not follow. BTW it is hard to respond when your post is continually ninja-edited.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  > Microsoft today is immaterial to the MS that should have been replanted in the 90s. Does not follow. Microsoft of today follows from the MS that wasn't replaced in the '90s. Of course it's material.
  - 6y ago

matthoiland 6y ago

> We will all be serfs (NPCs) in a feudal corporate cosplay. Perfect.

jariel 6y ago

Great statement, excellent articulation. " isn't even about them. It is about us and the world we want to live in. " ... we have to recognize that 'we don't own this stuff'. Yes - I do support anti-trust and possibly 'breaking up companies' but we have to be very, very careful at how we intercede into private groups affairs. The agents doing the 'breaking up' might just believe that they have incredible ability to 'oversee markets' and leverage the power for what they believe to be the 'greater good'. The power of 'free markets' is often overstated but we should remind ourselves that there is a lot of value there, more importantly it's not obvious. In the short run, it's easy for someone to delude themselves in to the view that 'one's responsibility to the ostensible greater good as governor' combined with 'the grand view of markets' should legitimately empower towards control and market manipulation. After all - a bunch of 'really smart analysts' should be able to maximize social utility through some kind of restructuring of whatever exists at any given time in the markets. It's a vey slippery slope and a hard thing to 'get right' - so any gains to be made here are going to be really correlated with how thoughtful and intelligent government will be on this one. Even with the greatest intentions it could be a mess. Whoever doing this needs to be really, really smart about it.

whimsicalism 6y ago
> private groups affairs. No such thing. They are relying on societal assurances that contracts they enter will be enforced, that property they hold will be protected, etc. Society is free to regulate those "private group affairs" since they are externalizing the costs onto society. > there is a lot of value there, more importantly it's not obvious Sure, but generally in the cases where politicians mistakenly intervene in markets with distortionary effects, economists are pretty united that the intervention will be a bad idea (see: rent control). On anti-trust, economists recognize monopolies as a pretty clear market failure and it seems to be the tech employees who are deploying the "free market" arguments in defense of Google, FB, et al.
- jariel 6y ago
  " Society is free to regulate those "private group affairs" since they are externalizing the costs onto society." Private property, freedom of association is a very real thing. It's a very serious thing to take private people's stuff from them. So we have to be careful.

fiftyfifty 6y ago

This is a good point, there is more to antitrust laws than just economics, they were put in place to protect our democratic republic. Senator John Sherman is quoted: "If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life." The Sherman Antitrust Act is the foundation of modern antitrust law.

whimsicalism 6y ago
I think this gets to the heart of the difference between republicanism and liberalism (the ideologies, not the political parties).
swebs 6y ago
Let's add "communicate" to that. It's crazy how much of the world's communication is controlled by a few guys in Silicon Valley and their arbitrary ToS.
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  But you have such a large number of choices for communication: Meet, Hangouts, Allo, Messages, Duo, Skype, Lync, Skype for Business, and Teams.
  - fouric 6y ago
    Those are all controlled by three companies, at most: Google (Meet, Hangouts, Allo, Duo), Microsoft (Lync, Skype, Skype for Business, Teams), and whatever company controls "Messages".
  - strombofulous 6y ago
    Yeah and all of them will ban if you say the wrong thing
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    Lync is "Skype for Business" now, afaik. And I think communication is one of the more open stacks. WebEx? Zoom? Slack? WeChat?

srtjstjsj 6y ago

> They ultimately controlled where those people worked (and their horrible commutes), who they were friends with, what schools their kids went to and who they married. All because the execs at these companies wanted to maintain total control of the workforce and suppress wages. This is ridiculous. It was a non-recruitment pact that led to lower pay (for already wealthy people, just not as wealthy ad that execs), not wage-fixing nor non-hiring nor control over where people live or went to school or who they marry. And the insulation that the wealthiest 1% of people are entitled to send their child to a better school than their non-tech-star neighbors is horrific. It exposes a worldview that extreme inequality is only bad if you aren't on top > NPCs What does this even mean? Being poorly paid and not having healthcare is bad, but being an "NPC" has nothing to do with it. How is being employed as a driver/cook/whatever more of a "PC"?

j4nt4b 6y ago
I think by NPC the parent meant a total lack of agency/mobility, perhaps comparable to feudal serfdom. Sure, you have a means of sustaining yourself, but if any job you can take or business you can create all involve a kickback to a monopolistic tech company, then your existence tends to serve their interests more than yours.

acituan 6y ago

> Any value that something this large has, is in its ability to exhaust resources from the ecosystem, control the market, the workers and the ability to resist changing its behavior when better things come along. It is no news that big-co can induce great harm, but let us not get swallowed into conspiratorial thinking. Large companies first and foremost benefit from economies of scale, not any dictatorial dynamics they might pursue. This is important, because when we decide to draw a line based on size (easy) and not on demonstrated harmful behavior (difficult), we have to answer the question "how big exactly we should allow corporations get then?". The answer to this question will determine if we as a society can enjoy certain things or not, because some goods' and services' existence requires that economies of scale. > Breaking up large companies isn't even about them. It is about us and the world we want to live in. Remember the wage fixing scandal between Pixar, Google, Apple and bunch of other companies in the bay? How is multiple companies colluding related to the question of a single company being broken up? Again, what they did was wrong, but let's not smuggle unnecessary emotional rhetoric into a rational argument. > That is too much power for a company to have or wield. Power concentrates whether we like it or not. Who should wield that power? Nation states? Religions? Or do we mandate a constant break up? You might break up your nation's companies but that doesn't prevent another country's corporations dominating the world market including yours, unless you pull a NK. Yes corporate power concentration can/does cause great harm, but I haven't heard a suggestion that can actually work in the real world. How about strengthening the opponent process of government and other democratic processes to undertake the difficult task of disincentivizing demonstrated harmful behavior? Developing mechanisms more sophisticated than "just break it up"? American big-co's are not the only big-co's in the world, maybe compare notes with how other nations handling these?

thomasz 6y ago
Being able to significantly alter public perception and influence the political process is one of the most important advantages of scale.
- acituan 6y ago
  Yes, and maybe our political and public perception apparatus doesn’t scale well to the long tail of public interest topics and a singular strong entity with clear goals is simply taking advantage of that mismatch.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tomjen3 6y ago

How would you have broken up MS? The Office programs are better together, Windows might be split of from the rest, but then what about IE? You can't sell a browser anymore, so either that dies (which would be bad back then because it was the most advanced browser) or it gets bundled with something else and the problem continues.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
GordonS 6y ago
I'd keep all the software together - Windows, Office, CRM, etc. Spinning out Bing/Microsoft Ads and Azure as separate companies feels kind of obvious, and could be interesting. I'm sure Azure could easily stand on it's own (might even be beneficial?!), but I wonder about the financial dependencies between Ads and Windows?

dmos62 6y ago

Thank you for painting such a memorable picture. Too often we retreat to abstract intellectual arguments about what's right or how the world works. We have to remember that these decisions are about our wellbeing, as industry workers, consumers and the ecosystem as a whole.

Barrin92 6y ago

>Any value that something this large has, is in its ability to exhaust resources from the ecosystem, control the market, the workers and the ability to resist changing its behavior when better things come along. Companies exist in a system that should serve everyone and when an imbalance occurs the whole system morphs around them. They are no longer players but dictators, willingly or not. Their sheer size forces rules of the game in ways even they do not control. This isn't really the whole story. Large firms don't just exist because of power, but also because to manage an increasingly complex environment (scientifically, economically etc) large institutions are required to hold the necessary knowledge to function effectively. The concentration towards larger firms is thus not just a power grab, but a necessary condition for modern production. This was Schumpeter's basic insight. Monopolistic competition is more dynamic than the free, small-firm dominated market. Size gives companies the ability to earn surplus profit which is turned into long-term innovation rather than short-term fighting for market share. The central dynamic around data collection in the information economy even amplifies that trend. Smaller firms are not going to reap benefits on the same scale as large firms can, and the primary economic case for break ups, which is that large firms are unproductive due to being unable to deal with complexity, has been turned on its head. Information now functions as a way to make centralisation more efficient, not less.

koluna 6y ago
_ Monopolistic competition is more dynamic than the free, small-firm dominated market. Size gives companies the ability to earn surplus profit which is turned into long-term innovation rather than short-term fighting for market share._ Ah yes, this good ol’ myth. To debunk it, look around you at all the major players in tech who are hoarding cash like there is no tomorrow while doing incremental improvements to products rather than building something interesting. The larger a company becomes, the more bloated and bureaucratic it becomes. Once they’re big enough, innovation is close to impossible, and the self-preservation instinct kicks in. Again, you can see that in almost all BigTech players today.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  What I can see, literally, by looking around is that my phone is made by Huawei, my TV by Samsung, my medicine is made by a large pharmaceutical company, the train I take to work and the rail network are built by a state owned company, the web framework I used yesterday is made by a colossal tech giant, so is the text editor I use (granted that one may vary), and the cloud infrastructure my software runs on. So are the cars on the sideways looking out of the window. All big firms. Large firms are quite literally who built all the complicated stuff at huge scale that pretty much everyone relies on all the time. I actually have to search around before I find something that was made by a small business. And that's not because of some conspiracy, it's because they happen to make the best stuff cheap, which is a consequence of their scale. It's not a myth, you can literally confirm that by I suppose checking who makes the stuff you voluntarily buy each day.

unixhero 6y ago

Very insightful comment. I also focus on the element of the world we want to live in, and whether the status quo or where we are heading is really it.

lowdose 6y ago

They get this big by buying up that many successful startups. I don't know about microsoft because it was for my time but Amazon bought Kiva Systems and now it is called Amazon Robotics. This ensures Amazon is the only company able to extract value from Kiva's robotics. Their robots drive the inventory around in fulfillment centers where order get picked on a rate of 300 per hour. Because they had a double frog leap on the competition Kivy would probably have IPOed by now. All of the technology companies have a specialized VC arm which rake up extraordinary talent before they become a competitor. Whatsapp was build with 12 engineers when they hit 1 billion users. FANG have a talent kartel.

closeparen 6y ago

Even with the price fixing scandal, TC is still much higher at the big corps than at small companies, isn’t it? Seems like the monopolistic largesse outweighs the competition factor, at least for tech work. The economics are different in other ways too: a big company hires someone who’s good at CS fundamentals and gives them time to learn whatever stack, while a small one needs someone with experience in exactly the right version of a framework. A big company can hire people for long term R&D while a small one needs features right now. It may be best for the economy that the spoils of monopoly be redistributed, but we are partly the beneficiaries of them.

gen220 6y ago

This is a great take. > What is the end state if we let this continue? One of the pillars of capitalism is the idea of "creative destruction" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall). That is, when a moderately-sized company falls apart, it's actually a long-term positive for the economy as a whole. It's decomposed, sold off, and its former pieces are repurposed for the good of all. One purpose of antitrust law is to keep the cycle of whale falls going. If antitrust law is unenforced, the whales never fall, which has a negative impact on the fragility of our economy: if and when these megacorps become anemic, they threaten to take down the whole economy/whale-decomposition process with them.

austincheney 6y ago

Microsoft stagnated only because of leadership executing on a weak vision. Microsoft was at war with open source under a mantra of make the world Microsoft and their market didn’t care. It’s like Microsoft was executing from the same playbook as Apple before Apple discovered media licensing even though Microsoft was 20x larger. Outdated vision. By embracing the opposite approach they turned things around.

subsubzero 6y ago

Break them up! The recent jump in engineers pay the past few years can be attributed to stopping this conduct by the large players: >Remember the wage fixing scandal between Pixar, Google, Apple and bunch of other companies in the bay? In addition when it comes to monopolies I always think of the Snapchat situation where a healthy, dynamic company comes up with a creative feature(stories) only to have the monopoly that is facebook completely rip it off and copy it in their own products thereby depressing snapchat's stock price and siphoning off its users. The fact that pinterest, twitter, and snapchat are not $100B+ companies and thriving is almost wholly due to facebook and its illegal monopolistic practices.

m463 6y ago

My thoughts on this: - Microsoft stagnated or reversed computer software in many ways during the 80's and 90's. How long did we go without multitasking? (on the other hand, it was solely responsible for the commoditization of hardware which gave us countless benefits) - being an employee in a company with robust competition is the best. (also for customers) Working in a company that is either too dominant or weak is an easy way to a job that lacks meaning.