41 ms·

Is the big tech era ending?

247 points by dash2 5y ago

streetcat1 5y ago
Big tech started with expertise but moved to rent seeking. Amazon is not in ecommerce but in a seller market place. google/facebooks are in ads, etc. The problem is not that you coffee store can do ecommerce, but that nobody can find your coffee store if it is not in amazon, or does not buy ads from google/facebook.
hanniabu 5y ago
The web2 era is ending while the web3 era is just getting started
- _alex_ 5y ago
  web3 just needs to come up with some problems for all it's solutions
throw_m239339 5y ago
No, it's just that, like banking in the en of 2000's the tech sector gets way more scrutiny from the media, the public and politicians, a convenient scapegoat to blame for all the problems. It's interesting how all the same politicians stopped talking about Wall Streets and "fat cat bankers"... the new big bad wolf is now "big tech", in 10 years it will be something else...
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  The fact that politicians and the media were talking about Wall Street ten years ago during the Great Recession, and talked about it less after economies started to recover, is not all that surprising. Similarly, the fact that politicians and the media are talking about big tech at a time when social media is being used to (depending on your politics) plan insurrections or deplatform the most important person in the world, doesn't seem like a misdirection from more relevant stories. I'm not sure what you're suggesting is the purpose of these narratives, but I think you need to be careful that you're not implying that there is a sinister group of people who control the world's media, financial, and political systems, and are using that control to direct people towards "scapegoats" to distract the public from their own nefarious plots.
wayeq 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
sh4un 5y ago
It's funny how you think voting for the same idiots will save anything.
i_am_proteus 5y ago
[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
hackthefender 5y ago
> big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of network effects. You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it. In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope that everything will just magically get better now that your local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf software seems slightly optimistic. But I hope I'm wrong.
- tim333 5y ago
  >Facebook ... stays big primarily because of network effects And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them doing that.
  - robryan 5y ago
    It is kind of working now, I doubt they would be able to buy TikTok. I don’t recall them being involved at all when Trump was trying to force its sale. But yeah big tech needs to be massive before it comes under any real antitrust scrutiny.
- dash2 5y ago
  Yes, there's a strong case for Facebook. But consider Skype: it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom. Facebook's strength isn't just a network, it also has a lot of people's recorded history. So, the power of network effects varies. I think if e.g. Signal came up with features that Whatsapp lacks, it would have a good chance to displace Whatsapp.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    > it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom Only because Microsoft probably assigned two interns to maintain Skype in the last 5 (if not more) years. I do agree with your point though.
api 5y ago
The most powerful disruptor of big tech would be to figure out how to escape, sidestep, or easily coopt their network effects.
- slackfan 5y ago
  The Amish are the fastest growing population group...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pdimitar 5y ago
Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days. The big tech era is in fact now just starting. The big corporations finally realized nobody is seriously challenging them so they will only tighten the grip gradually from here on. I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access. Keep your guard up, folks, and improve your hardware operation skills -- and any physical real-life skills in general. We can't all be dependent on the corps, they must always be shown we can do without them and we only tolerate them because they are not too unpleasant.
- mehdix 5y ago
  I'm doing my part: - Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    Unfortunately you were never the target audience. Companies like Google operate on the scale of billions, and the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.
    - tartoran 5y ago
      Yep. Same thougts here. But I feel that a turning point may come at some point though
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is to support these alternative services financially; and with bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that those alternative services become the easiest to use, at which point the rest of society will switch without having to be told. That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset. For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 [1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-vote-for-interoperable-messengers/209942/ https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...
mojuba 5y ago
> The most important ones are that big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever. The tech giants are not only good at whatever they're doing but are also capable of refreshing their expertise every 5 years or so, or even reinventing themselves as necessary. Neither Google nor Facebook are the same companies as they were 15 years ago. I worry that like some of the major [evil] banks that survived world wars and major crises, the tech giants aren't going away, and neither will it be easy to compete with them.
- thrav 5y ago
  Or, ya know, just buying whatever hot new thing that gets invented and has traction.
amelius 5y ago
For BigTech, the era is just beginning. For the small guy, yes, the era is ending.
- atemerev 5y ago
  The point of the article is exactly the opposite.
  - amelius 5y ago
    The article is wrong because knowledge won't help you much in a world where you need money, connections and manpower. E.g. even with all the knowledge, a small company cannot run a silicon fab. You are always dependent on Big Corps, who are just starting to figure out how they can become modern age feudal lords.
    - atemerev 5y ago
      This is why in modern capitalism you can use other people’s money and buy manpower with it. You’ll have to farm for connections, though: this skill is irreplaceable.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    Article is selling false/misguided hope
atemerev 5y ago
Now, in the world of crypto, we are exactly at stage one. "Ordinary people are profoundly ignorant about the wizardry that has appeared in their midst. They know it is powerful, but they don’t really know how it works. Rich people throw money at any wizard, hoping they will have the secret to eternal youth, or a bottomless sack of gold. Naturally, this generates a crowd of charlatan conjurers in fancy robes and hats. Only true wizards can tell a true wizard from a charlatan – but the true wizards are too busy selling spells of their own."
- nodemaker 5y ago
  Thats interesting. Is this from a russian novel of some kind?
  - reboog711 5y ago
    Isn't it from the linked article?
    - nodemaker 5y ago
      Ah yes it is. I only skimmed it
DeathArrow 5y ago
No. The big tech era won't stop. IBM got replaced by Microsoft. Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs, FAANGs will get replaced by other more ferocious animals. The article correctly states that monopolies aren't going to last long. But what the author didn't realize is there will always gonna be monopolies because the way society is constructed and the markets works incentivizes building monopolies. We are in the game of Monopoly. If a player lasts until the end of the game he is doomed to build a monopoly.
- seaman1921 5y ago
  In what universe did Microsoft get replaced ? Did you see the recent stock performance and jump in valuation of the company ? It is still a beast.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs Microsoft is still there with a $2.4T market cap. In the context of a discussion about big tech, Netflix is not really part of it. Although the FAANG acronym kind of stuck.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    MAGMA is a better acronym nowadays, as Microsoft is far larger than Netflix, and Facebook renamed to Meta.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      What about google > alphabet?
      - yyyk 5y ago
        Alphabet is more like a holding company which Google was put under, right? Google kept its name and its trademark. Compare https://about.google/ https://about.google/ with https://about.facebook.com/ https://about.facebook.com/ . The first is all about Google not Alphabet, while the second is about Meta and Facebook is not mentioned aside from the URL address*. Besides, I didn't see any good acronym with only A and M... Edit: I earlier didn't notice the Facebook name and logo turning dynamically into the Meta name and logo, but that doesn't actually make the argument weaker.
PedroBatista 5y ago
The shameless party in the open might be starting to start to end, nothing else. They’ll need to become more discreet and pay the right people more. Legally different companies will be controlled by the same group of people like some pseudo shadow board. Nothing new, nothing innovative. Don’t get me wrong, things will change but be the same where it really matters.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Big tech is big because we are globalising - because an app / website written in one country can be used in dozens of others, 192 if your i18n-fu is good enough. Scale is something we have not really taken on board as we head to 10 billion humans. And when we look critically at the Big in big tech now, they are really bit-players with leverage. News aggregators, search engines, publishing platforms. The traditional "media" have had outside influence and this new globalised generation has that, but compared to what's likely to come it's nothing. Global pharma, energy, transportation, new manufacturing, supply chain observability, consumer friendly finance. These things and more will have huge impacts - and all will have software at their hearts. If that (software) is what we mean by Tech, then yeah, Google is a minnow to come. But there is hope. Software (and observability) are incredibly amenable to democracy and independent monitoring, to smart regulation and smart outcomes. It's a political challenge to manage the wealth to come - but look at how the USA handled the robber barons. It took massive system wide political change if it happened. Don't give up. But Vote Harder.
- cryptica 5y ago
  Globalization overshot. It was mostly artificially propped up with the global fiat monetary system. Now that the fiat monetary system is running out of steam and heading into high inflation territory, we will revert back to a more localized world which most people will be happier in. Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.
  - opportune 5y ago
    This doesn’t make any sense. Parent is talking about how you can make a single product with a TAM of ~all of earths population. What does that have to do with money printing/fiat, besides perhaps causing an overvaluation? Even if those companies were overvalued, it doesn’t change the fact that technology and free trade enable hyper-scaling businesses.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    People have been moving into cities since time immemorial. Small farmers would move to Roman cities in search of higher paying jobs, or the dole. The Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated urbanization. All of that predates fiat currency.
clement_b 5y ago
Had fun checking where the hyperlinks of that article pointed to.
benjaminwootton 5y ago
The article started by making some interesting points but it lost me at the wizard stuff.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  As usual, the HN commentary is far more interesting than the linked article.
cryptica 5y ago
I hope so. Out with big tech, in with small decentralized tech.
xg15 5y ago
> The great dark towers of the necromancers, which tried to do everything magical under one roof, suffer the usual problems of conglomerates: weak incentives, and no specialist expertise. Eventually their empires shrink. Except we went through this a few times already. E.g. on the consumer side, there was dot com (open), AOL (conglomerate), web 2.0 (open) and now FAANG (conglomerate). This looks more like going in circles than one distincive trend.
talkingtab 5y ago
Dinosaurs were doomed because they were overly adapted to an ecosystem. They were evolutionary hill climbers, just as big tech is currently over adapted to the current environment. It may be years before these present day dinosaurs die out. There may be some catastrophic event that affects the environment or they may just wither. Who knows. But the signs that they are over adapted are certainly present.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Which particular ecosystem of the 300 million years traditionally ascribed to the dinosaur eras where they overly adopted to? Mammals have only made it 200-250M years, humans *far* less. and it's not clear the dinosaurs are gone (looks at a bird).
ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago
I don't think traditional companies will subsume technology as the article claims - big companies tend to innovate by acquisition, and VERY FEW companies are actually good at producing software at scale. I don't think we've reached phase 3 in the article yet - very few companies have figured out the "magic" of software, hardware, large scale data mining, hosting, etc. I also don't think tech will have long lasting monopolies, unless government regulation makes it so. Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? All of these were dominant at one point. I do expect a shift in investor mindset - right now tech companies are not held to the same profitability standards, so the tech stocks are very expensive for even wildly optimistic projections of future growth. It's as if the market is already pricing in a future monopoly for these companies. Given how fragile tech monopolies tend to be, I expect a correction at some point (not a good short though - no way to predict the timing)
- seaman1921 5y ago
  > Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? This statement would be relevant here if these companies hadn't been replaced by even bigger monopolies. So if facebook and apple is replaced by something even bigger, the folks who are afraid of monopolies would have more to worry about.
  - ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago
    IBM was a much bigger and more domineering monopoly at it's peak - there was a time where you effectively could not have computers or a datacenter without paying IBM money, directly or indirectly. I wouldn't qualify most of the FAANGs as monopolies (at least not yet) - reasonable substitutes exists for all of them. The modern market does favor a handful of large players for each market - this is true in almost all sectors though. This not a monopoly though; as long as the top players change over time it is still a working market.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      To be a monopoly, your industry has to matter a lot. Except for part of the 90s, IBM’s dominance wasn’t that important relative to the world. Even with big tech not as monopolistic as IBM, I think they are far more influential now. Even individually.
bernardlunn 5y ago
hell yes and here is why: Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components. Regulators are NOT the key!
- mooreds 5y ago
  Seems to me that Shopify, Stripe and Square all are members of BigTech. What am I missing?
bernardlunn 5y ago
Hell yes and here is why: Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components. It is NOT about the regulators!
bernardlunn 5y ago
Hell yes: Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components. NOT about regulators.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Amazon does not care about competing with small margin retail operations. That is why you cannot filter for items shipped and sold by Amazon.com. They are more interested in the 15%+ profit margin business of being a platform. Their market cap is $1.7T because of AWS and the commission they collect from third party sellers and the recurring revenue from high margin streaming services. The sourcing and selling physical things to customer business is worth much less, as indicated by Walmart’s market cap of $390B.
  - elwell 5y ago
    It's interesting how AWS has taken so much of the market. I suppose it's just a better product + the free tier.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. Are Shopify, Stripe, and Square not big tech? Maybe medium-big instead of mega-big?
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Shopify is Canada’s biggest company. A top 10 GDP country. All three are worth $100B+. I’d think they and PayPal are all close enough to big tech. Though as you say they aren’t mega big.
- dash2 5y ago
  It's a good point. Large companies aren't going away. But the market dominance of a few large companies might go away.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Additionally, from some quick googling, it looks like Stripe and Square both run on AWS? Shopify used to but now runs on GCS? Is OP mainly just talking about Amazon's dominance of online consumer shopping specifically, rather than a general thing about "big tech"?
    - kazen44 5y ago
      to be fair, there is very little reason why shopify or stripe couldn't run on a couple of racks of servers in a couple of datacenters across the globe.
      - Buttsite 5y ago
        So why don't they do that anymore? Just the love of migrating thousands of app instances and signing contracts with cloud hosts?
      - jrochkind1 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beardyw 5y ago
I think that there is possibility that nation states will awaken to the idea that they could do that, and have the power to take over. Obviously the idea is particularly attractive to more socialist governments, who could see themselves providing their own Amazon, or totalitarian governments, who would look to provide the rest. But I am not sure that would be the limit of it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pm90 5y ago
There are 2 major things the author fails to mention or address: 1) Even if Big Tech is not allowed (or chooses not to) compete directly, they’ve invested massively in creating platforms that power everything, especially other tech companies. eg Every new company starts off in AWS/GCP and most mature companies run their services on the cloud. It seems unlikely that they will be displaced here. 2) They’ve created an unprecedented concentration of skills, both in building and operating systems at scale. We do see a lot of scholarly material coming out of eg Google that has inspired OSS tools (not to mention directly to OSS like K8s or Android) and a bunch of SRE principles by employees (current or former) but with their lucrative compensation and career growth opportunities it looks like Big Tech will do just fine in attracting and retaining this talent. Which makes me somewhat skeptical if the big tech era will end anytime soon. One thing I have noticed is friends quitting big tech to join startups and many that remain saying that it’s quite boring; If big tech culture does change in a meaningful way, I see that as a much bigger threat to their dominance.
mrkramer 5y ago
It's not ending it is only the beginning because all antirust lawsuits will fail to do anything meaningful.
- crdrost 5y ago
  The article was not about antitrust but about vulgarity. Like the old school vulgarity, “the speech of the common folk.” The claim is that computation right now belongs to the nobilis and eruditus populus, and things like Excel and Hypercard that bring these things to the vulgus are pathetically limited... But, the story goes, maybe these new tools to wire a bunch of components together—payment gateways with wysiwyg website editors with email—constitute the beginning of a new world where the vulgus can also spread their wings and fly, rather than having to remain in the nest while us mature birds sail the updrafts of programming.
trabant00 5y ago
> society starts to learn more about wizardry. Real wizards are distinguished from charlatans by their results. A few wise wizards keep their power and even extend it. Ordinary people still can’t cast spells themselves, but they know the names of the wisest wizards. They do not know the wizards. Even the article uses Bezos as the target for the "wisest wizards" link. He is a king, not a wizzard! The wizzards are beink kept out of sight in the castles. And the royal courts issues statements that they do not exist. You merely have to use SAFE, Cloud, Containers, etc to have the same results.
gyre007 5y ago
NO
wreath 5y ago
They aren't going anywhere. We used to be told what to think and what to do by the Church, then by the State and from now on by Big Tech. It's only starting, baby. So buckle up.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
It's only going to get bigger unless governments put limits on it. I don't see how you can reach any other conclusion given 1. historically institutions get larger and larger until busted up 2. they tend to buy out anyone who has a better technology and swallow it up 3. technology isn't going anywhere.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> My coffee shop is not an existential threat to Amazon, which retains huge advantages of scale. But before, Amazon was the only firm that could really do ecommerce. Now, everywhere can. This is not a good example. In 2000 , it wasnt harder for the coffee shop to make a website than it was for amazon, and their challenges were similar: how to accept payments and how to deliver. Amazon solved those through scale, the coffee shop did not solve either of them (the author admits they send their kid to do deliveries). Accepting payments problem is easier today, but still not easy, and still not comparable with the world of cash where everyone everywhere has equal access to payments. Without some massive new tech that will break the moats of bigtech (payments, logistics network, lock-in via identity) i dont think bigtech will unbundle
dustingetz 5y ago
Beyond network effects (i.e. Microsoft's mortal grip on enterprise IT), there is also concentration of capital (i.e. many or most of Google's products were acquired, including Advertising!). You can't disrupt a monopoly from within. I think disruption occurs at certain watershed moments where a rapid paradigm change occurs: www, bitcoin, mobile, social, ecommerce, PC, internet. At these moments, growth is so fast and belief is so strong that a movement of previously untapped energy forms around it and this becomes a focal point for investment, concentrated at a single point in spacetime which is powerful enough to penetrate a monopoly. But only if growth is so abrupt that it can't acquire you first. And the capitalists are not going to fund the disruption as by definition capitalists operate at a scale where they can't understand it.
streamofdigits 5y ago
Remembe Fuller's quote "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete" Big tech is the existing reality and it can only be changed by making it obsolete. The digital technology for doing so is actually available (or can be refined rapidly). What is not available is the social technology: the attitude of governments and regulators, solid, honest-to-goodness business models, the education of the populace etc
- 58x14 5y ago
  I fully expect our next cycle to be one of de-platforming, with this quote in support. Decentralized technology is rife with fraud and noise, but ENS is an exemplary preview of a Web3 future. Like SSO without a middleman. It's a far superior user experience (no password requirements, email verification, data leaks), and allows developers to bypass account management altogether when building a webapp. To me, it's glaringly obvious this is one of the most significant milestones in our transition to a better web.
  - 1270018080 5y ago
    After cursory googling, it sounds like more blockchain nonsense. Just throwing buzzwords together and solving either a nonexistent problem, or solving it fundamentally worse than anything that already exists.
- pjkundert 5y ago
  Yes, this. Implementing centralized application rules on completely decentralized compute/networking foundations is now a thing. Let's say you want to build something like Mars Coin. It's gotta work reliably at the scale of billions of nodes, separated by minutes of transit time, at billions of aggregate transactions per second, at a cost below micro-cents per transaction. Without the possibility of being shut down by a government-scale bad actor. This is now becoming possible: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/mars-coin/ https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/mars-coin/
- smugglerFlynn 5y ago
boh 5y ago
It's obviously not. Persistent growth requirements for corporations will always lead to concentration. You need systematic change, not performative censures on popular companies to actually make an impact. Microsoft was broken up and it's still "big".
mikewarot 5y ago
Much of big tech has no physical inputs or outputs. It's mostly network effect holding companies the big tech companies together. There is some gained efficiency at scale when it comes to software as a service, but the actual barrier to entry can be scaled by an individual or a small collective (open source). The main input of the social networks is US, and our consent. If they break our trust, we start looking around for alternatives, and it might take a while, but we all hold grudges, and will route around their damage. We must retain access to general purpose computing, if we do that, we can keep routing around their mistakes, accidental, or not.
afterburner 5y ago
We just had a big-tech surge. Maybe the massive surge will calm down to not-as-insane growth, but that doesn't feel like an era "ending" to me.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I think it is ending, and I like the magic analogy used in the article. You've seen it before, with IBM, blockbuster, the entire music industry. Business entities get big and think their size protects them from disruption, they begin to implement abusive policies that pay off short term and don't worry about long term because they think their size protects them. This gravy train could go on forever it appears in the moment. Of course we have the advantage of hindsight. I think the same thing is beginning to happen to big tech. They're beginning to abuse users. Simultaneously, there are lots of alternative options to all of their products being developed. I see either them being supplanted by new companies (with a couple of course adapting and surviving), or the industry being disrupted heavily by novel ideas. I'd prefer the latter of course, but I will take either.
summerlight 5y ago
Big techs are relevant primarily because there are no other companies that can 1. execute its business reasonably well 2. at the planetary scale. There are some other factors including anti-competitive business practices but that won't work without its own edge; MS was not able to stop Google and the same thing for Google to FB as well. I've seen many HN readers claiming they can build a FB clone overnight, but that's not even the tip of iceberg. Serving your service to billions of people across hundreds of different languages, cultures geographical areas with different legal, financial, logistical infrastructures is at the fundamentally different level of complexity than building a toy project. This is not just for big techs, there are literally thousands of uninteresting but extremely profitable businesses simply for this very reason. And big techs owns platform which brings them to another level...
- gusbremm 5y ago
  But I bet the early versions of facebook wouldn't scale as well..
  - charlieyu1 5y ago
    Had a Facebook account since 2006. You basically have to claim you are an alumni from a school you didn’t go at all
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I really like the author’s writing style, so much so I just subscribed to their sub stack feed. I agree with the author that the future is unclear. I think it possible that the current tech megacorps might suffer a decline but if I was betting money I am not sure what fair odds would be. Tossing my own prophecy into the discussion: I think that we will see a combination of smaller distributed decentralized tech and businesses, but some of the giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. will continue to do well as long as they keep enough customers happy.
amznbyebyebye 5y ago
There is no soul left in these companies. It has become a day job to collect a paycheck. One guy working on ec2 can move to internal finance reporting can move to s3 and then move to retail (at amazon). Without the soul, at some point the hollowness will cause you to implode. Yes AWS can keep selling tech infra, but the net new innovation is where they suck. Look at how lackluster the reinvent keynotes were. So what do you do? Innovate with passion. And then what? They come and copy you and sell it at a greater scale, with more marketing $, growing some VPs pnl. I do think where you still have a chance is software. Big tech still hasn’t cracked software. But it can’t be tech infra software (AWS) and not social software (Fb). So compete where they don’t play is the safest. Because when they try to compete at least they will go through buy or build and will either buy you (and kill your soul) or build a shitty version within.
Causality1 5y ago
We're just now noticing the edge of the cliff rapidly passing eye level as we fall. Every time tech gets easier, its users get more ignorant. Microsoft can take a shit in our mouths with Windows 11 because the average Windows 11 user doesn't even know what an operating system is, let alone that they can change to a different one. Facebook and YouTube can do whatever they want because their only competitors are even more toxic than they are. Who do you think could make big tech fall? The politicians who think it's perfect the way it is or the ones who think it needs to be much worse?
- deleted 5y ago
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axegon_ 5y ago
Well... This [1] kinda answers it. Mind you, it is in the process of evolving into new products and markets. As I said a few days ago, I'm not sure what is next but somehow I'm gravitating towards IoT and embedded devices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Jensson 5y ago
People have known how to make large internet services for 15 years. You see less diversity in services people use today than back then. Everyone knew how to do magic before big tech started dominating, todays state is the steady state where a few big companies who mastered the current formula is dominating, little is happening. You'd need a new big cultural shift like the internet or the smartphone was for things to get upended again. No, crypto isn't it.
yalogin 5y ago
This is a tricky subject and I don’t think the big tech era is ending unless three things happen at once - 1. Split all big tech 2. Introduce regulations to clearly specify interoperability rules between networks and ecosystems 3. Regulations to protect privacy of individuals The problem is if they don’t happen together the big tech will have time to work around them and so the effect will not be as good. We don’t have the political will in this country to make that happen.
ShakataGaNai 5y ago
Nope. Not even close. It will change, for sure, but won't end. Look at other industries that have gone through massive consolidation. There are only a few large players in energy space, or cars. Now look at tech? Doesn't even have to go through consolidation, FAANG is already there. Until the government finds a way to cap the size of companies, or keep them split up... companies will continue to grow. Maybe big tech will end with the era of megatech.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI
tibyat 5y ago
[dead]
novok 5y ago
"Why work on a cool app or faster database, if Google or Facebook will copy your idea and sell it at scale?" Because if you've worked at these companies, you know you can spin circles around them in execution speed alone. Not to mention way too many things are too small scale for them to even pay attention to. And if your successful, they would rather buy you most of the time than make a competitor because it's probably cheaper for them in many cases. In startup world, it's pretty rare they go the copycat route. You can cite examples, but that is survivorship bias ignoring the many more they do not copy. The biggest issue with bigtech is actually hiring. They suck up the labor market and make it hard to get good people affordably. The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me.
- civilized 5y ago
  > The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me. Until you get a cool idea and can't stomach fighting the corporate bureaucracy to make it happen, so you start your own company. Like every generation of entrepreneurs before you.
- jason0597 5y ago
  > Because if you've worked at these companies [...] That's quite a rare thing if you look at the overall picture
reactor 5y ago
[flagged]
csomar 5y ago
> Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! I'm sorry but the local coffee shop was never competing with Amazon in the first place. In fact, the local coffee shop further entrenched big tech because it did not setup its proper ecommerce website, host it on its own servers and processed payments with crypto instead. The local coffee shop might have in fact jeopardized itself. Some local shops are still relevant because they cater to their specific area. By going online, this shop might give valuable information to what this special area is demanding; and if Amazon can buy this data, it's only a matter of time before the local coffee shop is doomed. > Firms begin to incorporate magic into their production processes. Some wizards specialize in helping particular sectors. Gradually, the dark arts diffuse into the population. The magic becomes mundane. I have very high doubts. The pandemic did push people online but I hardly find people learning development or technical skills; or at least trying to incorporate them into their workflows. They, at best, use the plug&play tools with no idea how these things work or without even reading the license. They also have no idea how their personal data is used and do not really care. The OP example of the local coffee shop is revealing. The coffee shop did not build his own website, did not run his own local server and did not process digital crypto payments. He could have done all of that and relied on no company to run his stack. Instead, he just setup a Shoppify store that has everything as plugins and pays a subscription to that.
grouphugs 5y ago
no, not even close, it's actually being cemented
moneywoes 5y ago
If anything small tech companies have been hammered recently e.g docusign, freshworks
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Phase 4: It is not "magic" anymore. Was it even magic to begin with. Did people working on computers in the 1950's refer to "magic". Did people describe early electronic calculators as "magic". Remember the 1990's install/configuation programs that were styled as "wizards", some including a silly pointy hat icon or character with a wand. Personally, I just could never buy into that metaphor.
lola-hart 5y ago
Yep. For the last 30 computers and the internet have revolutionized a lot of aspects of our lives but that is at an end. The way silicon chips can change and improve our society have been exhausted. The solutionism of big tech can't change that. The computer revolution is over now. Time to look in the next revolutionary technology. Probably biotech.

247 points by dash2 5y ago

Big tech started with expertise but moved to rent seeking. Amazon is not in ecommerce but in a seller market place. google/facebooks are in ads, etc. The problem is not that you coffee store can do ecommerce, but that nobody can find your coffee store if it is not in amazon, or does not buy ads from google/facebook.

hanniabu 5y ago

The web2 era is ending while the web3 era is just getting started

_alex_ 5y ago
web3 just needs to come up with some problems for all it's solutions

throw_m239339 5y ago

No, it's just that, like banking in the en of 2000's the tech sector gets way more scrutiny from the media, the public and politicians, a convenient scapegoat to blame for all the problems. It's interesting how all the same politicians stopped talking about Wall Streets and "fat cat bankers"... the new big bad wolf is now "big tech", in 10 years it will be something else...

dane-pgp 5y ago
The fact that politicians and the media were talking about Wall Street ten years ago during the Great Recession, and talked about it less after economies started to recover, is not all that surprising. Similarly, the fact that politicians and the media are talking about big tech at a time when social media is being used to (depending on your politics) plan insurrections or deplatform the most important person in the world, doesn't seem like a misdirection from more relevant stories. I'm not sure what you're suggesting is the purpose of these narratives, but I think you need to be careful that you're not implying that there is a sinister group of people who control the world's media, financial, and political systems, and are using that control to direct people towards "scapegoats" to distract the public from their own nefarious plots.

wayeq 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

sh4un 5y ago

It's funny how you think voting for the same idiots will save anything.

i_am_proteus 5y ago

[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

hackthefender 5y ago

> big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of network effects. You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it. In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope that everything will just magically get better now that your local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf software seems slightly optimistic. But I hope I'm wrong.

tim333 5y ago
>Facebook ... stays big primarily because of network effects And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them doing that.
- robryan 5y ago
  It is kind of working now, I doubt they would be able to buy TikTok. I don’t recall them being involved at all when Trump was trying to force its sale. But yeah big tech needs to be massive before it comes under any real antitrust scrutiny.
dash2 5y ago
Yes, there's a strong case for Facebook. But consider Skype: it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom. Facebook's strength isn't just a network, it also has a lot of people's recorded history. So, the power of network effects varies. I think if e.g. Signal came up with features that Whatsapp lacks, it would have a good chance to displace Whatsapp.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  > it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom Only because Microsoft probably assigned two interns to maintain Skype in the last 5 (if not more) years. I do agree with your point though.

api 5y ago

The most powerful disruptor of big tech would be to figure out how to escape, sidestep, or easily coopt their network effects.

slackfan 5y ago
The Amish are the fastest growing population group...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pdimitar 5y ago

Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days. The big tech era is in fact now just starting. The big corporations finally realized nobody is seriously challenging them so they will only tighten the grip gradually from here on. I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access. Keep your guard up, folks, and improve your hardware operation skills -- and any physical real-life skills in general. We can't all be dependent on the corps, they must always be shown we can do without them and we only tolerate them because they are not too unpleasant.

mehdix 5y ago
I'm doing my part: - Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  Unfortunately you were never the target audience. Companies like Google operate on the scale of billions, and the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.
  - tartoran 5y ago
    Yep. Same thougts here. But I feel that a turning point may come at some point though
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is to support these alternative services financially; and with bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that those alternative services become the easiest to use, at which point the rest of society will switch without having to be told. That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset. For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 [1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-vote-for-interoperable-messengers/209942/ https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...

mojuba 5y ago

> The most important ones are that big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever. The tech giants are not only good at whatever they're doing but are also capable of refreshing their expertise every 5 years or so, or even reinventing themselves as necessary. Neither Google nor Facebook are the same companies as they were 15 years ago. I worry that like some of the major [evil] banks that survived world wars and major crises, the tech giants aren't going away, and neither will it be easy to compete with them.

thrav 5y ago
Or, ya know, just buying whatever hot new thing that gets invented and has traction.

amelius 5y ago

For BigTech, the era is just beginning. For the small guy, yes, the era is ending.

atemerev 5y ago
The point of the article is exactly the opposite.
- amelius 5y ago
  The article is wrong because knowledge won't help you much in a world where you need money, connections and manpower. E.g. even with all the knowledge, a small company cannot run a silicon fab. You are always dependent on Big Corps, who are just starting to figure out how they can become modern age feudal lords.
  - atemerev 5y ago
    This is why in modern capitalism you can use other people’s money and buy manpower with it. You’ll have to farm for connections, though: this skill is irreplaceable.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Article is selling false/misguided hope

atemerev 5y ago

Now, in the world of crypto, we are exactly at stage one. "Ordinary people are profoundly ignorant about the wizardry that has appeared in their midst. They know it is powerful, but they don’t really know how it works. Rich people throw money at any wizard, hoping they will have the secret to eternal youth, or a bottomless sack of gold. Naturally, this generates a crowd of charlatan conjurers in fancy robes and hats. Only true wizards can tell a true wizard from a charlatan – but the true wizards are too busy selling spells of their own."

nodemaker 5y ago
Thats interesting. Is this from a russian novel of some kind?
- reboog711 5y ago
  Isn't it from the linked article?
  - nodemaker 5y ago
    Ah yes it is. I only skimmed it

DeathArrow 5y ago

No. The big tech era won't stop. IBM got replaced by Microsoft. Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs, FAANGs will get replaced by other more ferocious animals. The article correctly states that monopolies aren't going to last long. But what the author didn't realize is there will always gonna be monopolies because the way society is constructed and the markets works incentivizes building monopolies. We are in the game of Monopoly. If a player lasts until the end of the game he is doomed to build a monopoly.

seaman1921 5y ago
In what universe did Microsoft get replaced ? Did you see the recent stock performance and jump in valuation of the company ? It is still a beast.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs Microsoft is still there with a $2.4T market cap. In the context of a discussion about big tech, Netflix is not really part of it. Although the FAANG acronym kind of stuck.
- yyyk 5y ago
  MAGMA is a better acronym nowadays, as Microsoft is far larger than Netflix, and Facebook renamed to Meta.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    What about google > alphabet?
    - yyyk 5y ago
      Alphabet is more like a holding company which Google was put under, right? Google kept its name and its trademark. Compare https://about.google/ https://about.google/ with https://about.facebook.com/ https://about.facebook.com/ . The first is all about Google not Alphabet, while the second is about Meta and Facebook is not mentioned aside from the URL address*. Besides, I didn't see any good acronym with only A and M... Edit: I earlier didn't notice the Facebook name and logo turning dynamically into the Meta name and logo, but that doesn't actually make the argument weaker.

PedroBatista 5y ago

The shameless party in the open might be starting to start to end, nothing else. They’ll need to become more discreet and pay the right people more. Legally different companies will be controlled by the same group of people like some pseudo shadow board. Nothing new, nothing innovative. Don’t get me wrong, things will change but be the same where it really matters.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

Big tech is big because we are globalising - because an app / website written in one country can be used in dozens of others, 192 if your i18n-fu is good enough. Scale is something we have not really taken on board as we head to 10 billion humans. And when we look critically at the Big in big tech now, they are really bit-players with leverage. News aggregators, search engines, publishing platforms. The traditional "media" have had outside influence and this new globalised generation has that, but compared to what's likely to come it's nothing. Global pharma, energy, transportation, new manufacturing, supply chain observability, consumer friendly finance. These things and more will have huge impacts - and all will have software at their hearts. If that (software) is what we mean by Tech, then yeah, Google is a minnow to come. But there is hope. Software (and observability) are incredibly amenable to democracy and independent monitoring, to smart regulation and smart outcomes. It's a political challenge to manage the wealth to come - but look at how the USA handled the robber barons. It took massive system wide political change if it happened. Don't give up. But Vote Harder.

cryptica 5y ago
Globalization overshot. It was mostly artificially propped up with the global fiat monetary system. Now that the fiat monetary system is running out of steam and heading into high inflation territory, we will revert back to a more localized world which most people will be happier in. Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.
- opportune 5y ago
  This doesn’t make any sense. Parent is talking about how you can make a single product with a TAM of ~all of earths population. What does that have to do with money printing/fiat, besides perhaps causing an overvaluation? Even if those companies were overvalued, it doesn’t change the fact that technology and free trade enable hyper-scaling businesses.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  People have been moving into cities since time immemorial. Small farmers would move to Roman cities in search of higher paying jobs, or the dole. The Industrial Revolution greatly accelerated urbanization. All of that predates fiat currency.

clement_b 5y ago

Had fun checking where the hyperlinks of that article pointed to.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

The article started by making some interesting points but it lost me at the wizard stuff.

wrycoder 5y ago
As usual, the HN commentary is far more interesting than the linked article.

cryptica 5y ago

I hope so. Out with big tech, in with small decentralized tech.

xg15 5y ago

> The great dark towers of the necromancers, which tried to do everything magical under one roof, suffer the usual problems of conglomerates: weak incentives, and no specialist expertise. Eventually their empires shrink. Except we went through this a few times already. E.g. on the consumer side, there was dot com (open), AOL (conglomerate), web 2.0 (open) and now FAANG (conglomerate). This looks more like going in circles than one distincive trend.

talkingtab 5y ago

Dinosaurs were doomed because they were overly adapted to an ecosystem. They were evolutionary hill climbers, just as big tech is currently over adapted to the current environment. It may be years before these present day dinosaurs die out. There may be some catastrophic event that affects the environment or they may just wither. Who knows. But the signs that they are over adapted are certainly present.

mellavora 5y ago
Which particular ecosystem of the 300 million years traditionally ascribed to the dinosaur eras where they overly adopted to? Mammals have only made it 200-250M years, humans *far* less. and it's not clear the dinosaurs are gone (looks at a bird).

ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago

I don't think traditional companies will subsume technology as the article claims - big companies tend to innovate by acquisition, and VERY FEW companies are actually good at producing software at scale. I don't think we've reached phase 3 in the article yet - very few companies have figured out the "magic" of software, hardware, large scale data mining, hosting, etc. I also don't think tech will have long lasting monopolies, unless government regulation makes it so. Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? All of these were dominant at one point. I do expect a shift in investor mindset - right now tech companies are not held to the same profitability standards, so the tech stocks are very expensive for even wildly optimistic projections of future growth. It's as if the market is already pricing in a future monopoly for these companies. Given how fragile tech monopolies tend to be, I expect a correction at some point (not a good short though - no way to predict the timing)

seaman1921 5y ago
> Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? This statement would be relevant here if these companies hadn't been replaced by even bigger monopolies. So if facebook and apple is replaced by something even bigger, the folks who are afraid of monopolies would have more to worry about.
- ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago
  IBM was a much bigger and more domineering monopoly at it's peak - there was a time where you effectively could not have computers or a datacenter without paying IBM money, directly or indirectly. I wouldn't qualify most of the FAANGs as monopolies (at least not yet) - reasonable substitutes exists for all of them. The modern market does favor a handful of large players for each market - this is true in almost all sectors though. This not a monopoly though; as long as the top players change over time it is still a working market.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    To be a monopoly, your industry has to matter a lot. Except for part of the 90s, IBM’s dominance wasn’t that important relative to the world. Even with big tech not as monopolistic as IBM, I think they are far more influential now. Even individually.

bernardlunn 5y ago

hell yes and here is why: Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components. Regulators are NOT the key!

mooreds 5y ago
Seems to me that Shopify, Stripe and Square all are members of BigTech. What am I missing?

bernardlunn 5y ago

Hell yes and here is why: Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components. It is NOT about the regulators!

bernardlunn 5y ago

Hell yes: Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! Ten years ago, this would have been much harder. Now, it’s a matter of plugging in off-the-shelf components. NOT about regulators.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Amazon does not care about competing with small margin retail operations. That is why you cannot filter for items shipped and sold by Amazon.com. They are more interested in the 15%+ profit margin business of being a platform. Their market cap is $1.7T because of AWS and the commission they collect from third party sellers and the recurring revenue from high margin streaming services. The sourcing and selling physical things to customer business is worth much less, as indicated by Walmart’s market cap of $390B.
- elwell 5y ago
  It's interesting how AWS has taken so much of the market. I suppose it's just a better product + the free tier.

jrochkind1 5y ago

skinnymuch 5y ago
Shopify is Canada’s biggest company. A top 10 GDP country. All three are worth $100B+. I’d think they and PayPal are all close enough to big tech. Though as you say they aren’t mega big.
dash2 5y ago
It's a good point. Large companies aren't going away. But the market dominance of a few large companies might go away.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Additionally, from some quick googling, it looks like Stripe and Square both run on AWS? Shopify used to but now runs on GCS? Is OP mainly just talking about Amazon's dominance of online consumer shopping specifically, rather than a general thing about "big tech"?
  - kazen44 5y ago
    to be fair, there is very little reason why shopify or stripe couldn't run on a couple of racks of servers in a couple of datacenters across the globe.
    - Buttsite 5y ago
      So why don't they do that anymore? Just the love of migrating thousands of app instances and signing contracts with cloud hosts?
    - jrochkind1 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

beardyw 5y ago

I think that there is possibility that nation states will awaken to the idea that they could do that, and have the power to take over. Obviously the idea is particularly attractive to more socialist governments, who could see themselves providing their own Amazon, or totalitarian governments, who would look to provide the rest. But I am not sure that would be the limit of it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pm90 5y ago

There are 2 major things the author fails to mention or address: 1) Even if Big Tech is not allowed (or chooses not to) compete directly, they’ve invested massively in creating platforms that power everything, especially other tech companies. eg Every new company starts off in AWS/GCP and most mature companies run their services on the cloud. It seems unlikely that they will be displaced here. 2) They’ve created an unprecedented concentration of skills, both in building and operating systems at scale. We do see a lot of scholarly material coming out of eg Google that has inspired OSS tools (not to mention directly to OSS like K8s or Android) and a bunch of SRE principles by employees (current or former) but with their lucrative compensation and career growth opportunities it looks like Big Tech will do just fine in attracting and retaining this talent. Which makes me somewhat skeptical if the big tech era will end anytime soon. One thing I have noticed is friends quitting big tech to join startups and many that remain saying that it’s quite boring; If big tech culture does change in a meaningful way, I see that as a much bigger threat to their dominance.

mrkramer 5y ago

It's not ending it is only the beginning because all antirust lawsuits will fail to do anything meaningful.

crdrost 5y ago
The article was not about antitrust but about vulgarity. Like the old school vulgarity, “the speech of the common folk.” The claim is that computation right now belongs to the nobilis and eruditus populus, and things like Excel and Hypercard that bring these things to the vulgus are pathetically limited... But, the story goes, maybe these new tools to wire a bunch of components together—payment gateways with wysiwyg website editors with email—constitute the beginning of a new world where the vulgus can also spread their wings and fly, rather than having to remain in the nest while us mature birds sail the updrafts of programming.

trabant00 5y ago

> society starts to learn more about wizardry. Real wizards are distinguished from charlatans by their results. A few wise wizards keep their power and even extend it. Ordinary people still can’t cast spells themselves, but they know the names of the wisest wizards. They do not know the wizards. Even the article uses Bezos as the target for the "wisest wizards" link. He is a king, not a wizzard! The wizzards are beink kept out of sight in the castles. And the royal courts issues statements that they do not exist. You merely have to use SAFE, Cloud, Containers, etc to have the same results.

gyre007 5y ago

wreath 5y ago

They aren't going anywhere. We used to be told what to think and what to do by the Church, then by the State and from now on by Big Tech. It's only starting, baby. So buckle up.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

It's only going to get bigger unless governments put limits on it. I don't see how you can reach any other conclusion given 1. historically institutions get larger and larger until busted up 2. they tend to buy out anyone who has a better technology and swallow it up 3. technology isn't going anywhere.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> My coffee shop is not an existential threat to Amazon, which retains huge advantages of scale. But before, Amazon was the only firm that could really do ecommerce. Now, everywhere can. This is not a good example. In 2000 , it wasnt harder for the coffee shop to make a website than it was for amazon, and their challenges were similar: how to accept payments and how to deliver. Amazon solved those through scale, the coffee shop did not solve either of them (the author admits they send their kid to do deliveries). Accepting payments problem is easier today, but still not easy, and still not comparable with the world of cash where everyone everywhere has equal access to payments. Without some massive new tech that will break the moats of bigtech (payments, logistics network, lock-in via identity) i dont think bigtech will unbundle

dustingetz 5y ago

Beyond network effects (i.e. Microsoft's mortal grip on enterprise IT), there is also concentration of capital (i.e. many or most of Google's products were acquired, including Advertising!). You can't disrupt a monopoly from within. I think disruption occurs at certain watershed moments where a rapid paradigm change occurs: www, bitcoin, mobile, social, ecommerce, PC, internet. At these moments, growth is so fast and belief is so strong that a movement of previously untapped energy forms around it and this becomes a focal point for investment, concentrated at a single point in spacetime which is powerful enough to penetrate a monopoly. But only if growth is so abrupt that it can't acquire you first. And the capitalists are not going to fund the disruption as by definition capitalists operate at a scale where they can't understand it.

streamofdigits 5y ago

Remembe Fuller's quote "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete" Big tech is the existing reality and it can only be changed by making it obsolete. The digital technology for doing so is actually available (or can be refined rapidly). What is not available is the social technology: the attitude of governments and regulators, solid, honest-to-goodness business models, the education of the populace etc

58x14 5y ago
I fully expect our next cycle to be one of de-platforming, with this quote in support. Decentralized technology is rife with fraud and noise, but ENS is an exemplary preview of a Web3 future. Like SSO without a middleman. It's a far superior user experience (no password requirements, email verification, data leaks), and allows developers to bypass account management altogether when building a webapp. To me, it's glaringly obvious this is one of the most significant milestones in our transition to a better web.
- 1270018080 5y ago
  After cursory googling, it sounds like more blockchain nonsense. Just throwing buzzwords together and solving either a nonexistent problem, or solving it fundamentally worse than anything that already exists.
pjkundert 5y ago
Yes, this. Implementing centralized application rules on completely decentralized compute/networking foundations is now a thing. Let's say you want to build something like Mars Coin. It's gotta work reliably at the scale of billions of nodes, separated by minutes of transit time, at billions of aggregate transactions per second, at a cost below micro-cents per transaction. Without the possibility of being shut down by a government-scale bad actor. This is now becoming possible: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/mars-coin/ https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/mars-coin/
smugglerFlynn 5y ago

boh 5y ago

It's obviously not. Persistent growth requirements for corporations will always lead to concentration. You need systematic change, not performative censures on popular companies to actually make an impact. Microsoft was broken up and it's still "big".

mikewarot 5y ago

Much of big tech has no physical inputs or outputs. It's mostly network effect holding companies the big tech companies together. There is some gained efficiency at scale when it comes to software as a service, but the actual barrier to entry can be scaled by an individual or a small collective (open source). The main input of the social networks is US, and our consent. If they break our trust, we start looking around for alternatives, and it might take a while, but we all hold grudges, and will route around their damage. We must retain access to general purpose computing, if we do that, we can keep routing around their mistakes, accidental, or not.

afterburner 5y ago

We just had a big-tech surge. Maybe the massive surge will calm down to not-as-insane growth, but that doesn't feel like an era "ending" to me.

betwixthewires 5y ago

I think it is ending, and I like the magic analogy used in the article. You've seen it before, with IBM, blockbuster, the entire music industry. Business entities get big and think their size protects them from disruption, they begin to implement abusive policies that pay off short term and don't worry about long term because they think their size protects them. This gravy train could go on forever it appears in the moment. Of course we have the advantage of hindsight. I think the same thing is beginning to happen to big tech. They're beginning to abuse users. Simultaneously, there are lots of alternative options to all of their products being developed. I see either them being supplanted by new companies (with a couple of course adapting and surviving), or the industry being disrupted heavily by novel ideas. I'd prefer the latter of course, but I will take either.

summerlight 5y ago

Big techs are relevant primarily because there are no other companies that can 1. execute its business reasonably well 2. at the planetary scale. There are some other factors including anti-competitive business practices but that won't work without its own edge; MS was not able to stop Google and the same thing for Google to FB as well. I've seen many HN readers claiming they can build a FB clone overnight, but that's not even the tip of iceberg. Serving your service to billions of people across hundreds of different languages, cultures geographical areas with different legal, financial, logistical infrastructures is at the fundamentally different level of complexity than building a toy project. This is not just for big techs, there are literally thousands of uninteresting but extremely profitable businesses simply for this very reason. And big techs owns platform which brings them to another level...

gusbremm 5y ago
But I bet the early versions of facebook wouldn't scale as well..
- charlieyu1 5y ago
  Had a Facebook account since 2006. You basically have to claim you are an alumni from a school you didn’t go at all

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I really like the author’s writing style, so much so I just subscribed to their sub stack feed. I agree with the author that the future is unclear. I think it possible that the current tech megacorps might suffer a decline but if I was betting money I am not sure what fair odds would be. Tossing my own prophecy into the discussion: I think that we will see a combination of smaller distributed decentralized tech and businesses, but some of the giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. will continue to do well as long as they keep enough customers happy.

amznbyebyebye 5y ago

There is no soul left in these companies. It has become a day job to collect a paycheck. One guy working on ec2 can move to internal finance reporting can move to s3 and then move to retail (at amazon). Without the soul, at some point the hollowness will cause you to implode. Yes AWS can keep selling tech infra, but the net new innovation is where they suck. Look at how lackluster the reinvent keynotes were. So what do you do? Innovate with passion. And then what? They come and copy you and sell it at a greater scale, with more marketing $, growing some VPs pnl. I do think where you still have a chance is software. Big tech still hasn’t cracked software. But it can’t be tech infra software (AWS) and not social software (Fb). So compete where they don’t play is the safest. Because when they try to compete at least they will go through buy or build and will either buy you (and kill your soul) or build a shitty version within.

Causality1 5y ago

We're just now noticing the edge of the cliff rapidly passing eye level as we fall. Every time tech gets easier, its users get more ignorant. Microsoft can take a shit in our mouths with Windows 11 because the average Windows 11 user doesn't even know what an operating system is, let alone that they can change to a different one. Facebook and YouTube can do whatever they want because their only competitors are even more toxic than they are. Who do you think could make big tech fall? The politicians who think it's perfect the way it is or the ones who think it needs to be much worse?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

axegon_ 5y ago

Well... This [1] kinda answers it. Mind you, it is in the process of evolving into new products and markets. As I said a few days ago, I'm not sure what is next but somehow I'm gravitating towards IoT and embedded devices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Jensson 5y ago

People have known how to make large internet services for 15 years. You see less diversity in services people use today than back then. Everyone knew how to do magic before big tech started dominating, todays state is the steady state where a few big companies who mastered the current formula is dominating, little is happening. You'd need a new big cultural shift like the internet or the smartphone was for things to get upended again. No, crypto isn't it.

yalogin 5y ago

This is a tricky subject and I don’t think the big tech era is ending unless three things happen at once - 1. Split all big tech 2. Introduce regulations to clearly specify interoperability rules between networks and ecosystems 3. Regulations to protect privacy of individuals The problem is if they don’t happen together the big tech will have time to work around them and so the effect will not be as good. We don’t have the political will in this country to make that happen.

ShakataGaNai 5y ago

Nope. Not even close. It will change, for sure, but won't end. Look at other industries that have gone through massive consolidation. There are only a few large players in energy space, or cars. Now look at tech? Doesn't even have to go through consolidation, FAANG is already there. Until the government finds a way to cap the size of companies, or keep them split up... companies will continue to grow. Maybe big tech will end with the era of megatech.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI

tibyat 5y ago

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novok 5y ago

"Why work on a cool app or faster database, if Google or Facebook will copy your idea and sell it at scale?" Because if you've worked at these companies, you know you can spin circles around them in execution speed alone. Not to mention way too many things are too small scale for them to even pay attention to. And if your successful, they would rather buy you most of the time than make a competitor because it's probably cheaper for them in many cases. In startup world, it's pretty rare they go the copycat route. You can cite examples, but that is survivorship bias ignoring the many more they do not copy. The biggest issue with bigtech is actually hiring. They suck up the labor market and make it hard to get good people affordably. The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me.

civilized 5y ago
> The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me. Until you get a cool idea and can't stomach fighting the corporate bureaucracy to make it happen, so you start your own company. Like every generation of entrepreneurs before you.
jason0597 5y ago
> Because if you've worked at these companies [...] That's quite a rare thing if you look at the overall picture

reactor 5y ago

[flagged]

csomar 5y ago

> Here’s a concrete example: in last year’s lockdown, my local coffee shop started to deliver beans. They set up a slick web store with Shopify. They took payment with Stripe or Square. The owner’s kid brought the beans round on his bike. In other words, they competed with Amazon, because they had to! I'm sorry but the local coffee shop was never competing with Amazon in the first place. In fact, the local coffee shop further entrenched big tech because it did not setup its proper ecommerce website, host it on its own servers and processed payments with crypto instead. The local coffee shop might have in fact jeopardized itself. Some local shops are still relevant because they cater to their specific area. By going online, this shop might give valuable information to what this special area is demanding; and if Amazon can buy this data, it's only a matter of time before the local coffee shop is doomed. > Firms begin to incorporate magic into their production processes. Some wizards specialize in helping particular sectors. Gradually, the dark arts diffuse into the population. The magic becomes mundane. I have very high doubts. The pandemic did push people online but I hardly find people learning development or technical skills; or at least trying to incorporate them into their workflows. They, at best, use the plug&play tools with no idea how these things work or without even reading the license. They also have no idea how their personal data is used and do not really care. The OP example of the local coffee shop is revealing. The coffee shop did not build his own website, did not run his own local server and did not process digital crypto payments. He could have done all of that and relied on no company to run his stack. Instead, he just setup a Shoppify store that has everything as plugins and pays a subscription to that.

grouphugs 5y ago

no, not even close, it's actually being cemented

moneywoes 5y ago

If anything small tech companies have been hammered recently e.g docusign, freshworks

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Phase 4: It is not "magic" anymore. Was it even magic to begin with. Did people working on computers in the 1950's refer to "magic". Did people describe early electronic calculators as "magic". Remember the 1990's install/configuation programs that were styled as "wizards", some including a silly pointy hat icon or character with a wand. Personally, I just could never buy into that metaphor.

lola-hart 5y ago

Yep. For the last 30 computers and the internet have revolutionized a lot of aspects of our lives but that is at an end. The way silicon chips can change and improve our society have been exhausted. The solutionism of big tech can't change that. The computer revolution is over now. Time to look in the next revolutionary technology. Probably biotech.