4 ms·
> 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 payme
by 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 agoShopify 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 agoIt's a good point. Large companies aren't going away. But the market dominance of a few large companies might go away.
- jrochkind1 5y agoAdditionally, 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 agoto 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 agoSo why don't they do that anymore? Just the love of migrating thousands of app instances and signing contracts with cloud hosts?
- jrochkind1 5y agoAnd yet...
- jonas21 5y agoIt seems to me like this is a case of new large tech companies coming to dominate new markets while the existing tech companies continue to dominate their old markets.
- Nasrudith 5y agoLook at what areas they demonize as "big tech" and why. It isn't a matter of harm - cable carriers and ISPs get treated with kid gloves. It is media which they see as competing with them. The three Ses they don't know or care about.