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Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?
For the average person, it’s hard to imagine a world where the GAMA are not so utterly dominant. However, there’s clearly a precedent of “nothing lasts for ever” in tech with former incumbents such as IBM, Intel, Yahoo, AOL, Oracle, to a certain extent Microsoft, and many others losing their grip of their quasi-monopolistic market positions. Do you see a near future where today’s GAMA shuffle to become a different acronym (or doing away with big 4 acronyms altogether)? If so, what are the events that will lead up to it and who will be the first to go?
Note, not arguing that they should be taken down a notch necessarily, but rather more interested in the economic arguments of whether it’s possible or even likely.
- mikewarot 4y agoNobody has yet implemented the Memex proposed by Bush in 1945.[1] In it, hyperlinked documents were stored in a massive LOCAL library, and could be shared in context at will. Local storage of data removes the tracking information you supply to enable advertising, and give them profits at your expense. It would drive the copyright rentier class (Disney et al) nuts, but could also be quite handy to have in the coming wave of DeGlobalization and supply chain restructuring. The editor of the Atlantic in his introduction said "The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work." Yet here we are, 70+ years later with that vision unfulfilled. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
- afarrell 4y agoWho will be willing to pay for it?
- mikewarot 4y agoIt's just a program, there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software. As for how would development be funded, a group effort, open source.
- cruano 4y ago> there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software Do you know where you are writing this? God, even if you managed to find people that are willing to sacrifice their >$100K/year for a good cause, "local storage" has both a start and a maintenance cost, especially "massive" ones. And copyright is a legal issue, not a technological one
- mikewarot 4y ago>Do you know where you are writing this? Yes, in a community of people with a bent towards making things to scratch an itch. Some of them are highly in favor of monetizing those things, but yet not all, and we have been known to favor open source projects from time to time.
- mixedCase 4y agoSo... IPFS, Torrents, eDonkey/Kad, Tor, I2P, what is missing between those?
- mikewarot 4y agoLocal storage of everything. A language for the markup of hypertext documents (no, HTML doesn't do that). A strategy for recording an annotative trail.
- mixedCase 4y agoAll of those allow local storage. They in fact assume it. > A language for the markup of hypertext documents (no, HTML doesn't do that) What is missing? Specially when accounting for anchor links being able to target protocols other than HTTPs. > A strategy for recording an annotative trail Could you go into descriptive detail of what you actually mean here?
- mikewarot 4y agoIf I have a document, you can't annotate it without embedding new code in the document... you can't add a layer of markup on top of, and separate from, it. The decision to embed markup in documents was horrible in its effects. It gives copyright holders extortive power over criticism, for example. You have to copy a document to mark it up, which didn't need to be the case. As for annotative trail... imagine being able to lay out a set of pages of paper on a larger white sheet... and then make notes between two things showing how they are logically associated, in context. HTML links are blind, unidirectional, fragile, and can't go to an arbitrary position in a document.
- mixedCase 4y agoSorry but the first part you wrote doesn't make much sense. To the best of my understanding, you're just saying that you want diffs to be stored instead of a full copy of a document? If the whole point is to skirt around broken legislation/executive power not enforcing fair use as it should you've already lost on the fact alone that courts can interpret your layering as infringement; courts around the world have previously rule linking to be infringement as-is. But if you believe that'll actually solve things you could easily build an extension that layers HTML patches on top of another base HTML via XPath "coordinates". Of course I'm sure you've realized that if your base HTML is hosted by a hostile entity, good luck keeping it up to date with their modifications, and that's not limited to HTML as it would be a an issue regardless of whatever system you come up with and expect "the bad guys" to adopt. You either have copies, which means hosting copyrighted material, or you have references, which can go out of date. > HTML links are blind, unidirectional, fragile, and can't go to an arbitrary position in a document. Blind/unidirectional is fixed at the client level (e.g. the back button, history, you could do something like what this extension did if you want trees: https://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/09/display-firefox-browsing-history-with-history-tree/ https://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/09/display-firefox-browsing-h...). It doesn't make the slightest bit of technical sense to track backlinks on every hosted document because the incentives don't align and you'd be wasting a whole lot of space. You could have a separate service store this in a graph much like a web crawler. Don't need to reinvent HTML for that. Fragile, you fix with copies. You can't force people to host an immutable record forever and yes this is abusable by copyright trolls, again, can't fix the law with tech. As for linking to an arbitrary direction, you can href to a an ID and that's good enough a lot of the time. If you want any more than that you don't have to re-invent HTML: you just have to extend it with support for XPath targets. And that's something you can easily do with a browser extension all while keeping it fully backwards compatible with the web.
- jstx1 4y ago> IBM, Intel, Yahoo, AOL, Oracle, to a certain extent Microsoft(...) Do you see a near future where today’s FAANG shuffle to become a different acronym By market cap the six largest US tech companies are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla and Meta (in that order). Netflix is number 71 on the list (of all companies, not just tech); it's smaller than Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce etc. 'FAANG' catching on as an acronym doesn't say all that much about these companies as a group.
- Gaessaki 4y agoI could include another dozen or companies that I would target in this question. FAANG is simply a stand-in. I guess we could go with GAMA instead.
- cutierust 4y agoI bet Paul Graham created that acronym
- jstx1 4y agoIt was Jim Cramer - FANG (without Apple) were 4 stocks that he liked back in 2013 and it kind of caught on and evolved from there.
- GianFabien 4y agoI'm not an economist, just some random techie. I don't think you can lump all of GAMA together. I think that Meta and Twitter which rely almost entirely on advertising revenue are the most vulnerable. Google with some products and Apple with several products should be less vulnerable. Amazon covers several niches: distributor, advertiser, web services, so they are probably facing numerous challenges in the future. If the headwinds in the near future intensify, then I suspect that advertising spending will reduce and thus any business that sustains itself purely on advertising revenue will have serious problems.
- mtberatwork 4y agoWhat headwinds? The Western world is a consumption driven society (with the US being an extreme version I would say), so I don't think advertising/PR spending will be reduced, just transferred from one focus to another. The businesses that are driven by ad revenues will pivot to wherever the ad dollars go.
- jmoak3 4y ago>so I don't think advertising/PR spending will be reduced I disagree, if consumer spending is reduced due to less equity valuations or less overall liquidity, then the ad spend will follow. A recession could easily bring this about.
- PaulHoule 4y agoIt’s already happened to Facebook. Zuckerberg would love to trade his company for TikTok and their version of the ‘metaverse’ is cruelly mocked in all corners. Amazon is slipping. In the last two years they quit delivering Prime packages in two days in much of the US. Most other retailers have sped up their deliveries in this time frame. Customers are starting to notice. Everything AMZN has pioneered is now widespread in business. For instance AWS was fresh once but Azure is a peer. Netflix is just another movie studio no.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoNo you can't just trust the market to regulate - that's capitalist propaganda. The government must intervene.
- rowanG077 4y agoI'm not sure what your point is. Just because these companies aren't eternal doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate them. I'd wager most people would be fantastically happy if browser tracking and personalized ads/content were illegal.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoAmazon is not slipping, they are by far the largest online delivery service and marketplace. Not to mention ever growing brand names and overall dominance. Azure has always been a peer. Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted, I wish Amazon would break apart, but that's far from the case.
- PaulHoule 4y agoAmazon is big but it is not the best. Their momentum is going to work against them in the long term. Somebody who is in the Prime habit is going to order 20 items from Amazon waiting 4-7 days each time. Someday they're going to buy something from another retailer like Adorama or Best Buy or Target or Walmart and get it the next day and say... Wow! Amazon has the considerable advantage of having a larger catalog but who knows what fragment of the catalog is a scam.
- Fradow 4y agoOne possible future is that the increasing pressure to have data out of reach of the US under the Patriot Act will lead to powerful competitors outside the US, starting from domestic market and then expanding internationally. It's already well under way in China, where US big tech isn't as prevalent and one big example of this is Aliexpress, which is known outside of China borders. Russia is known for having local competitors as well. The biggest push though is currently the GDPR, which makes it illegal to handle EU citizens data in a way that allows the US to access it. While enforcement is super slow and non-compliance very very high, it's slowly having an impact, where EU businesses now try harder to choose EU providers to avoid that non-compliance. While I don't know of a specific success-story to point out right now, I think there are good odds there will be some in the long term. Note that I only talk about GDPR because I'm European, but there are similar initiatives in other countries around the world. I heard about Brazil LGPD for example.
- strikelaserclaw 4y agofather time erodes everything. These companies really start eroding when the people who built the company die, and then you get a lot of politics and bureaucracy.
- crazygringo 4y agoI would say not likely. As industries mature, incumbents acquire enough of an advantage that they don't get outcompeted, you just want until the market for their product disappears. It's like asking if Coca-Cola, Nabisco, or Unilever are going to get "taken down a notch". No, not really. Also "take down a notch" is some pretty judgmental phrasing, as if it implies they're bigger than they deserve to be, as if they're doing something wrong. Google owns search, Amazon owns retailing, Microsoft owns enterprise, and Apple owns hardware. Every market has a runner-up as well in terms of profitability (arguably Bing, Wal-Mart, Google Cloud, Dell respectively), but that's in the same way Pepsi is the eternal runner-up to Coca-Cola. These markets are pretty mature now, in ways that they weren't in the days of Yahoo and AOL. In contrast, IBM was dominant for decades and only declined as eventually consumer PC's disrupted mainframes. So really you'd have to ask, what could ever fundamentally disrupt/replace search, online shopping, office software suites, or phones/laptops? It's pretty hard to imagine until something like generalized artificial intelligence comes along.
- tmpz22 4y ago> Google owns search, And Youtube and Chrome and Android and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning via their massive data hoard > Amazon owns retailing And Cloud and Whole Foods and more > Microsoft owns enterprise And Github and VSCode and EA, Bethesda/Zenimax/Xbox game studios (Obsidian etc), and Blizzard/Activision > Apple owns hardware And is making a huge push into Ads, and Music, they also control their hardware at an extreme level via iOS, the App Store, etc. --- These are mega-corporations that are expanding to the overall detriment of society.
- Gaessaki 4y agoDidn't mean to imply that they were necessarily doing anything wrong or right (and I tried to clarify that with the last sentence of my post). In my book, "taking down a notch" means to humble someone. Companies like Apple and Google can make uniliteral decisions that move markets (for better or for worse), in a way that other companies can't. The crux of the question is whether they'll be able to hold onto this liberty. On the same vein, I think it's totally fair to ask whether a non-tech company like Nestlé could be taken down a notch. All that being said, I buy your point. As long as their core offerings remain undisrupted/maintained, it's hard to envision things being different.
- scyzoryk_xyz 4y agoIt never/always will. The acronyms are ever changing when you expand the scope to other industries and historical time periods. Big 5 Hollywood Studios of the 40’s, Robber Barons, Rockefellers, Telecoms of the 90’s are just a few that come to my mind without reaching for sources. But you could probably look back further at Rothschilds and the trade companies responsible for colonization and slave trade even. Anywhere, where disembodied capital seeks to maximize profits. We’ve been here already, and we will again. Not much more than 15 years ago all of the companies in the GAMA acronym were companies we were mostly rooting for. Now they’re the “big ones.” I don’t think there will ever be a single threshold moment to witness. Some of them will fade in or out, others will abruptly merge or splinter. They’re really just temporary holographic systems of meanings. The people, the talent, the product and capital move around dynamically.