8 ms·

When AT&T got fragmented we got C. I think It's time Apple, Google, Amazon and maybe even Microsoft got restructured.

by swingingFlyFish 3y ago

aalimov_ 3y ago
I think we’ve got enough programming languages..
- HaZeust 3y ago
  We didn't, back then. C changed the game for low-level machine coding - what other games would be changed by fragmenting FAANG?
  - stuff4ben 3y ago
    I'd like to see something around operating systems (mobile and desktop) and personal assistants/AI. But that may be too high-level.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Honestly, just getting back to the point that you can write your own app and easily install it on your friends' phones would change the world. The amount of interesting stuff we lose to the inability of hobbyists to tinker with their technology is incalculable.
      - HaZeust 3y ago
        Write a mobile responsive website in HTML/CSS/JS and port it to hybrid mobile with Capacitor.JS?
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        That doesn't allow you to do a large number of things that ordinary apps can do -- or that "approved" apps also can't do, e.g. by modifying parts of the system in advantageous ways. You can also obviously just buy a PC and run whatever you want, but the entire point is the barrier to entry. If it's easy, more people do it, and that's good. If they have to contend with a convoluted mess, people give up, and you lose whatever they might have created.
turminal 3y ago
Wow, I didn't know about this correlation, where can I read more about that?
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  We actually got a lot more. For example, we got modems and without modems it is likely we would not have Internet, at least not free version of it.
  - LegibleCrimson 3y ago
    That doesn't make much sense to me. Modems existed before the AT&T breakup. You can't encode a digital signal for transmission ever an analogue medium without a modem, and a modem seems entirely beside any point of a free internet to me.
0xDEF 3y ago
>Apple, Google, Amazon and maybe even Microsoft What would be the economic and geopolitical consequences of the US breaking up the only US companies that are globally competitive? Chinese giants will outcompete the smaller less competitive remnants after these kind of corporate breakups.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  evaluation of Chinese companies will be more stringent than local companies against the rules of monopolies.
- mmaunder 3y ago
  That’s a strong argument for nationalization of large businesses. Competition fosters innovation, and monopoly kills it. Competition with larger companies gave birth to Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
  - 0xDEF 3y ago
    Neither Apple, Google, Amazon, nor Microsoft have a systemic monopoly.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      That must be why you can get Windows laptops that run fast, silent, cool with great battery life and integrates well with their phones, watches and tablets. And let’s not talk about those great fast Android phones that are still getting security updates a decade later…
      - amadeuspagel 3y ago
        > fast, silent, cool with great battery life Exactly. I forgot to mention the competition between chip manufacturers that makes this possible, which obviously leads to much better chips then a monopoly like Apple could produce.
leejoramo 3y ago
As I recall, we got C and UNIX because the conditions of AT&T’s telecommunications monopoly prevented them from competing in software. So they gave away the source code to academic institutions for a comparatively small fee and weak licensing Tried to find a references for this and found a blog post and comments https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/16/why-att-licensed-unix-to-universities/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/16/why-att-licensed-u...
jklinger410 3y ago
> When AT&T got fragmented We temporarily had like 20 phone services, and we ended up back with (barely) 3.
- kibwen 3y ago
  This is normal. Markets tend towards consolidation because of the beneficial effects of economies of scale. Absent outside intervention, monopoly is the natural end state of a market. Sometimes this intervention comes naturally (tech changes, consumer tastes change, companies randomly implode), but where it doesn't, it's the government's role to periodically reset the market to a competitive state. This is necessary to have efficient markets.
  - ragebol 3y ago
    Network effect is another cause for consolidation in the case of the current tech giants.
  - seec 3y ago
    I wish more people understood this. You can't go full communist top-down economy because it will inevitably lead to sub-optimal and inefficient solution. But full-blown competition will inevitably lead to a "mega" winner, because over time he can use his superior efficiency/technology (whatever advantage makes him better) to buy or starve the competition. In the end when the market is finally dominated by a few players you tend to lose the benefits of efficiency of scale because they abuse their position to raise prices, collude and whatnot. So, something needs to be done eventually. I think there are 2 "solutions" to try: - breaking up a company once it becomes too big; separating the various business it operates, so that they cannot have unfair advantage of consolidation and competitors have a better chance (it's easy to "win" when you can subsidize one branch losses with another high margins...) - preventing them from becoming so big in the first place by forbidding them to buy any other business. If they have to grow organically it would take lots more time, require more ressource from the main business and take years to be competitive. I never understood why we let some companies swallow another just because it has the money. Companies with too much cash on hand are pointing at an economic inefficiency and it just means they should be taxe more because they are stealing too much ressources from the world. Anyway, we end up in those situations because we assume a lot of things that are just plain wrong, in the first place the notion that the pie just gets bigger. It's fundamentally false because ressource are limited (natural ressources, numbers of humans, total available time, etc). When you make runners compete, you give all of them a single, similar lane; you don't just let a single runner push everyone out of a single lane... But the second case is exactly how our economy works...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikestew 3y ago
Pardon? C was developed in the 70s[0], and AT&T wasn't broken up until 1982[1]. Or am I misinterpreting "fragmented"? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
- babypuncher 3y ago
  C and UNIX were proprietary Bell Labs technologies until Ma Bell was broken up and told they couldn't compete in software.
  - mikestew 3y ago
    Ah, clears it up for me now, thanks.
AndrewStephens 3y ago
Are you arguing for or against? More seriously, each of those companies could be split without too much trouble and no loss of shareholder value. Microsoft in particular seems to be made up of components that work against each other.

When AT&T got fragmented we got C. I think It's time Apple, Google, Amazon and maybe even Microsoft got restructured.

aalimov_ 3y ago

I think we’ve got enough programming languages..

HaZeust 3y ago
We didn't, back then. C changed the game for low-level machine coding - what other games would be changed by fragmenting FAANG?
- stuff4ben 3y ago
  I'd like to see something around operating systems (mobile and desktop) and personal assistants/AI. But that may be too high-level.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Honestly, just getting back to the point that you can write your own app and easily install it on your friends' phones would change the world. The amount of interesting stuff we lose to the inability of hobbyists to tinker with their technology is incalculable.
    - HaZeust 3y ago
      Write a mobile responsive website in HTML/CSS/JS and port it to hybrid mobile with Capacitor.JS?
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        That doesn't allow you to do a large number of things that ordinary apps can do -- or that "approved" apps also can't do, e.g. by modifying parts of the system in advantageous ways. You can also obviously just buy a PC and run whatever you want, but the entire point is the barrier to entry. If it's easy, more people do it, and that's good. If they have to contend with a convoluted mess, people give up, and you lose whatever they might have created.

turminal 3y ago

Wow, I didn't know about this correlation, where can I read more about that?

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
We actually got a lot more. For example, we got modems and without modems it is likely we would not have Internet, at least not free version of it.
- LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  That doesn't make much sense to me. Modems existed before the AT&T breakup. You can't encode a digital signal for transmission ever an analogue medium without a modem, and a modem seems entirely beside any point of a free internet to me.

0xDEF 3y ago

>Apple, Google, Amazon and maybe even Microsoft What would be the economic and geopolitical consequences of the US breaking up the only US companies that are globally competitive? Chinese giants will outcompete the smaller less competitive remnants after these kind of corporate breakups.

nashashmi 3y ago
evaluation of Chinese companies will be more stringent than local companies against the rules of monopolies.
mmaunder 3y ago
That’s a strong argument for nationalization of large businesses. Competition fosters innovation, and monopoly kills it. Competition with larger companies gave birth to Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Neither Apple, Google, Amazon, nor Microsoft have a systemic monopoly.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    That must be why you can get Windows laptops that run fast, silent, cool with great battery life and integrates well with their phones, watches and tablets. And let’s not talk about those great fast Android phones that are still getting security updates a decade later…
    - amadeuspagel 3y ago
      > fast, silent, cool with great battery life Exactly. I forgot to mention the competition between chip manufacturers that makes this possible, which obviously leads to much better chips then a monopoly like Apple could produce.

leejoramo 3y ago

As I recall, we got C and UNIX because the conditions of AT&T’s telecommunications monopoly prevented them from competing in software. So they gave away the source code to academic institutions for a comparatively small fee and weak licensing Tried to find a references for this and found a blog post and comments https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/16/why-att-licensed-unix-to-universities/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/16/why-att-licensed-u...

jklinger410 3y ago

> When AT&T got fragmented We temporarily had like 20 phone services, and we ended up back with (barely) 3.

kibwen 3y ago
This is normal. Markets tend towards consolidation because of the beneficial effects of economies of scale. Absent outside intervention, monopoly is the natural end state of a market. Sometimes this intervention comes naturally (tech changes, consumer tastes change, companies randomly implode), but where it doesn't, it's the government's role to periodically reset the market to a competitive state. This is necessary to have efficient markets.
- ragebol 3y ago
  Network effect is another cause for consolidation in the case of the current tech giants.
- seec 3y ago
  I wish more people understood this. You can't go full communist top-down economy because it will inevitably lead to sub-optimal and inefficient solution. But full-blown competition will inevitably lead to a "mega" winner, because over time he can use his superior efficiency/technology (whatever advantage makes him better) to buy or starve the competition. In the end when the market is finally dominated by a few players you tend to lose the benefits of efficiency of scale because they abuse their position to raise prices, collude and whatnot. So, something needs to be done eventually. I think there are 2 "solutions" to try: - breaking up a company once it becomes too big; separating the various business it operates, so that they cannot have unfair advantage of consolidation and competitors have a better chance (it's easy to "win" when you can subsidize one branch losses with another high margins...) - preventing them from becoming so big in the first place by forbidding them to buy any other business. If they have to grow organically it would take lots more time, require more ressource from the main business and take years to be competitive. I never understood why we let some companies swallow another just because it has the money. Companies with too much cash on hand are pointing at an economic inefficiency and it just means they should be taxe more because they are stealing too much ressources from the world. Anyway, we end up in those situations because we assume a lot of things that are just plain wrong, in the first place the notion that the pie just gets bigger. It's fundamentally false because ressource are limited (natural ressources, numbers of humans, total available time, etc). When you make runners compete, you give all of them a single, similar lane; you don't just let a single runner push everyone out of a single lane... But the second case is exactly how our economy works...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mikestew 3y ago

Pardon? C was developed in the 70s[0], and AT&T wasn't broken up until 1982[1]. Or am I misinterpreting "fragmented"? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

babypuncher 3y ago
C and UNIX were proprietary Bell Labs technologies until Ma Bell was broken up and told they couldn't compete in software.
- mikestew 3y ago
  Ah, clears it up for me now, thanks.

AndrewStephens 3y ago

Are you arguing for or against? More seriously, each of those companies could be split without too much trouble and no loss of shareholder value. Microsoft in particular seems to be made up of components that work against each other.