7 ms·

I'm always surprised this isn't discussed more. Big tech is accused of being monopolistic, but there is a constant flow of new players in the field, all gainin

• ineedasername 6y ago
  There may be a constant flow of new players, but much of the time when they start to show a certain amount of success then one of the big players simply buys them up.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    Correct except, Microsoft should have won search. They had all the tools to execute and were pretty much at the right place at the right time. Google should have won social networking and messaging. They had the userbase and the network. Yet it's Facebook that did. Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.
    • vagrantJin 6y ago
      > Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market. Samsung and Huawei captured the market Apple created.
      • Armisael16 6y ago
        Samsung and Huawei each ship about 50% more phones than Apple. Apple makes more than 3x the profit on phones that either does.
      • adventured 6y ago
        Ask Samsung how they're doing in the world's largest smartphone market - China (they barely exist at all now, ~1% market share).
  • TuringNYC 6y ago
    You phrase it as if these are hostile takeovers. Having been a founder, I can state that most of my peers wanted acquisitions. It was a way to finance the vision and growth. Would YouTube, Instagram, or dozens of other companies have been able to get where they are w/o the support of their acquirers? Just think of the burn alone and the required investment is a scary figure.
    • neolog 6y ago
      > my peers wanted acquisitions Yeah but the users didn't want them to get acquired, end their "incredible journey" and delete the users' data.
      • TuringNYC 6y ago
        I understand your pain on this because i've been there. At the same time, deep down, I think many of us have also learned the truth: If there is some startup providing some ridiculously awesome service and strangly isnt charging: 1. It will charge in the future, and even that charge may not be sufficient to cover costs (see: Quantopian recently, apparently could not find a price point which kept users and also kept the service) 2. It may get acquired, to finance long-term profitability (see: YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram) 3. You may be giving up more than you thought you were (e.g., privacy) (see: like half the social media startups) 4. It may get acquihired, and often the product is sunset (see: Slide, Parse) 5. It may shut down (see: like 95% of your friends startups) As a former founder, I can say most startups are just one funding round away from case 5 (bankruptcy) -- see MapR. In which case, sometimes you accept case 4 (acquihire) as a consolation prize. Many of us want to be the next FAANG, but reality strikes that obviously not all 100,000 startups out there will become a fang. Often, you teeter in case 1 (barely making it), and if that happens too long, you might go with option 2 (strategic acquisition.) There are a lot of problems as a founder. Not all of them are actually about tech. I'll list some problems: 1. You are constantly questioning yourself -- is life just about eating ramen noodles and working? Did I really study and get top grades for 20yrs only to barely life? Mabye I can sell out. This should not be a problem post Series A, but is def an early stage issue. 2. You have liabilities - student loans, healthcare, rent, etc. Sure, you can couch surf, but should that be expected of people? 3. After marketing and ads especially, you often dont make as much as you think. Sometimes you make a limited time bet, and if things dont catch, you move on.
• jancsika 6y ago
  > I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. In a lot of states there is legislation banning them from doing just that. Plus-- where are all the videos demoing what it's like having a fiber connection, to rouse all the people who live in internet deserts? For fuck's sake, the article references kids lurking around Taco Bell "scrounging for internet." If you are a technologist with a fiber connection, please take five minutes away from overclocking your company's attention-sucking machine to see what it's like working toward a goal that is 100% non-creepy. Edit: clarification
  • walterbell 6y ago
    Here's a success story with photos of a customer running conduit and fiber to enable Comcast service. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1403795 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1403795 Is there a good place to look for similar success stories on customer-initiated extensions at the edge of rural broadband networks?
  • inetknght 6y ago
    I found this comment deep in an unrelated thread [0] a couple months ago. It describes someone who created his own ISP for his neighborhood using fiber and links to a good video [1] about it. It's worth using youtube-dl to archive it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24410506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24410506 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg
• biggermike 6y ago
  Big tech has big profit margins. Big telecom services doesn't. Competitors don't enter the industry because there's little money to be made. The only way you make money by starting an independent ISP right now is by serving some niche clientele e.g. serving wireless internet to events at locations without enough broadband access.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    Sounds like a perfect situation for coops. As long as they break-even then it's a success.
    • IggleSniggle 6y ago
      I’ve heard of communities doing this very thing, or creating city-owned ISPs, and then getting shut down as illegal due to “unfair competition” (the argument being that the government has unfair advantages vs a private company)
      • zajio1am 6y ago
        City-owned ISPs are unfair competition, but coops or non-gov non-profit organizations are perfectly valid approach.
  • darkwizard42 6y ago
    I don't think competitors are avoiding telecom due to low margins. I guess you could say the high amount of start-up capital AND high regulatory hurdles AND the low margins (meaning your payback takes longer) cause it to be undesirable...then... yeah margins are (part of) the issue
    • biggermike 6y ago
      > high amount of start-up capital AND high regulatory hurdles AND the low margins Not independent variables. The large wired broadband ISPs already enjoy economies of scale (access to capital, army of lawyers, etc.) and operate at slim margins. An independent ISP would need to reach the same size just to get the same near-zero margins. That being said, there is a market for independent ISPs, but they tend to serve specialty customers where margins are much higher.
• giobox 6y ago
  There's arguably been a few instances of "no one ever got fired for picking IBM" syndrome in neighborhoods I have lived in that considered it. When a local authority run by people with little understanding of the technology is presented with a local infrastructure bid from a not so well known group vs a glossy Comcast/AT&T/<big telco> bid etc... I absolutely agree though. It's an antitrust problem that has caused me genuine huge cost increases in reality (Comcast mandatory 1TB data cap in Comcast only neighborhoods. not sure if this nonsense still going on), not just hypothetically. There are ways to expose the existing networks to competition too. There are examples out there of using careful legislation to force a big monopoly player to share cable space and so on, allowing other vendors to compete on price.
• zepearl 6y ago
  > I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. Wondering the same thing here (Switzerland), but I might not understand the context: decoupling the "cable" from the "provider" is not common in the US, or there are some other complexities that I don't understand? In my case the company "Swisscom" opened half of the sidewalk, connected my apartment building to their FTTH infrastructure, then sent me a ton of flyers etc.. to advertise their Internet, but I still decided to use a tiny provider located 100km away (being small, high customer focus etc...) => works since 7 months perfectly, latency is good (e.g. 2-8ms to ping 8.8.8.8), etc... . My parents had basically nothing (half-broken copper wire), then on a random day the city's electricity&water&gas company team suddenly turned up, installed the FTTH cable (old house => turned out to be super-complicated to push that tiny cable through the house's structure => took them 4hrs), then they left, that's it => me and my parents then had multiple discussions about providers and they finally chose "Sunrise" (one of the major ones in Switzerland) and everything so far has been perfect. As far as I understand how things work here, the company that provides the cable earns money paid by the providers that use that cable, which in turn earn money paid by their customers => everybody earns money, everybody is happy. For very small communities (e.g. the one where my parents live - ~800 inhabitants), the town/village might have to directly finance a part of the costs needed to lay down the cables (which in turn are covered by common taxes), but that in turn makes the small community more desirable by whoever takes it into consideration when moving.
  • nine_k 6y ago
    Many municipalities expressly made contracts with cable TV networks to wire their towns / neighborhoods in exchange for a monopoly in cable access. Else the cable company did not have enough incentive (or pretended to) to lay the cable at all. So the cable company owned the only copper capable of broadband internet, and also the underground channels to lay fiber in. They naturally upgraded their hub spots to allow Internet traffic, and laying the last mile all over again is prohibitively expensive, or even administratively prohibited, in a lot of places. There is, of course, phone infrastructure! But Bell was a textbook monopoly, and pieces if it retained the infrastructure after its split. So in some places they can profitably reuse the copper they have to also provide Internet service, and sometimes you can even get fiber from them in newer houses which were wired with fiber backbone for the phone service anyway. In some areas the fixed-line copper is not good enough, and running fiber is too expensive because of low housing density. In large proper cities, of course, the situation is much better, because infrastructure cost per reached customer is much lower.
• pottertheotter 6y ago
  There are a lot of municipalities doing exactly what you say and making the money back fast. But a lot of states have blocked doing this, and the incumbents fight like crazy to turn people against the idea. My favorite way of implementing it is open access. The city installs and owns the infrastructure and anyone can come be an ISP on it. You get great competition. It's basically the same as how it works with the community owning the roads and you pick who you want to service your house (FedEx, UPS, yourself, DoorDash, the local roofing guy, etc.) The other thing that would be worthwhile is local loop unbundling, which is basically open access but with existing providers having to open their infrastructure. I highly recommend muninetworks.org and their podcast if you want to learn more about municipal broadband.
  • treis 6y ago
    >There are a lot of municipalities doing exactly what you say and making the money back fast Can you give us an example?
• austincheney 6y ago
  Stagnation isn't directly related to market dominance.