4 ms·

This helps illustrate something I've always wondered. When you consider the anti-competitive, innovation stifling behavior of Microsoft in the 90s or Google/Ap

This helps illustrate something I've always wondered. When you consider the anti-competitive, innovation stifling behavior of Microsoft in the 90s or Google/Apple today, what's the impact in terms of holding back humanity? I often think the greed and bad acting (ex: platforms as silos) we see from tech leaders that are idolized actually makes them all failures in the context of advancing humanity. They're good at business, but only because they're good at creating choke points, holding back innovation, and charging us for the privilege of evolving. I think we could do a lot better if we viewed the last 30-40 years as complete failure, ousted all of the supposed business "leaders" we have, and re-organized based on rewarding people that do the most to improve the planet and average quality of life.

manvillej 3y ago
The current business strategy across the tech industry is to kill off the competition rather than compete. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, really any business. Buy the competition or undercut the market so much that they die off. Once you are a monopoly, jack up prices. Its industry standard.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  This is true. This is also hardly a novel development. John D. Rockefeller based much of his business and economic worldview on the notion that competition was wasteful, and monopolies efficient. He's hardly the only well-known business figure to do so, you can find similar sentiments from, say, Peter Thiel, particularly in Zero to One. A great exploration of the general trend of established commercial enterprises and interests to oppose new arrivals and competition is Bernhard J. Stern's 1937 article Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations: <https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...> Markdown: <https://rentry.co/szi3g https://rentry.co/szi3g> I'd learned of that work through the work of Stern's student research assistant who'd done much of the literature search before going on to his own further career as a chemist and ultimately author: Isaac Asimov.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    I'd meant to note: Ron Chernow's book Titan discusses this fairly extensively, though I'd need to look up the specific page / chapter references.
anthonypasq 3y ago
> re-organized based on rewarding people that do the most to improve the planet and average quality of life Any centralized human attempt to do this has generally been a disaster, and a capitalist would argue that markets are you best shot at doing this.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  I would tend to agree. Oust was probably too strong of a word. It's not something you can enforce, because corruption would ruin it eventually. I'm not some luddite, and I think people should be able to get rich enough to never have to worry about money if they contribute something that increases overall global productivity by a lot more than the average person, so capitalism is probably the only realistic way to do that. Where it breaks for me is that I don't think anyone should get rewarded to the point where they're a billionaire. For example, when I estimate the human cost of a $500 million yacht, I think of it as 10k+ lifetimes of work and consider it a misuse of resources. That labor should be directed somewhere else and no one should have enough money and power to "waste" it on something as superfluous as a yacht. What I really meant is that we need changes in attitudes and education. Instead of viewing the current tech leaders as geniuses for aggregating users, limiting (or eliminating) choice, and charging for access to users, which is a cost that gets passed to those users, we need the average person to understand the damage done in terms of lost innovation, increased prices, and wasted labor. I think teaching financial literacy in schools would help a lot. People just don't understand how badly they're getting ripped off IMO.
  - zx8080 3y ago
    > financial literacy Good point. But not a silver bullet: if taught badly, it only helps involving people into shady financial pyramid schemes.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  There's a middle ground, where we use free market effects to encourage competition and bolster progress, while not letting monopolies and other progress-stifling mechanisms take form. You can have all the benefits of a free market without also letting someone like Google have the kind of control over the internet that they do.
FredPret 3y ago
You can oust any business leader you want by out-selling them (easier said than done!) But there is one tiny upshot of the monopolistic platforms - it simplifies the go-to-market strategy for all third parties. Hardware and software vendors had a much easier time simply developing for PC for a good two decades. Now of course we have the web which makes software development even easier than that, but companies like Nvidia have a harder time dealing with multiple platforms than in a Windows-only world.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  I’d argue that’s a huge upshot. Countless software makers have an easier time making products with more homogeneity in the substrate.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I often think the greed and bad acting (ex: platforms as silos) we see from tech leaders that are idolized Among my acquaintances, I honestly don't know a single person who idolizes these tech leaders. So this statement depends a lot on in which circles you spend your time/life. > I think we could do a lot better if we viewed the last 30-40 years as complete failure, ousted all of the supposed business "leaders" we have, and re-organized based on rewarding people that do the most to improve the planet and average quality of life. By your conscious buying decisions, you decide which business leader you want to reward. It's that easy.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > Among my acquaintances, I honestly don't know a single person who idolizes these tech leaders. I've talked to people that think Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are going to be standing beside St. Peter at the pearly gates.
  - atoav 3y ago
    Met that type as well, but the admiration (some would call it boot-licking) is just an expression of their desire to also be in that position themselves. Sometimes I wonder if such people just lack the imagination needed to see how little being in their spot would actually give them. Figures like those got who they are based on a mixture of inherited wealth, luck and a certain, probably sociopathic drive that they are inable to guard against. But crucially: happy people they are not. Just watching Elon Musk — the richest guy on earth — being less in control of his life and less secure in who he is, than me, a a former art student, is truly something to marvel at. Leading a good life is truly an art in itself, and people on a power trip are extremely rare to be good at it.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  > By your conscious buying decisions, you decide which business leader you want to reward. It's that easy. Let's not blame consumers for the bad actions of corporations, please.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> When you consider the anti-competitive, innovation stifling behavior of Microsoft in the 90s or Google/Apple today, what's the impact in terms of holding back humanity? They actually moved humanity forward. Microsoft/Apple/Google have brought computing to the masses. They made computers work for the average person. Whether from the goal to put a PC on every desk, put a powerful portable, usable computer in every pocket, and brought turn-by-turn directions to the masses. The whole Unix, designing only for the high-priesthood and everybody else be damned philosophy has probably held back computing more than anything Microsoft or Apple or Google did.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > They actually moved humanity forward. Yes, that's undeniable, but what I'm saying is I think they did a bad job and that we could be further ahead. As a small example, take the time wasted on developing for IE6 because anti-competitive practices were used to prevent alternatives. What's the opportunity cost in terms of the innovation that could have been achieved if all those development hours went into something more productive than fighting with a crappy product from an entrenched incumbent? What if Apple would have embraced Java and Oracle hadn't fumbled / abandoned JavaFX? I would argue that developing with JavaFX was a better experience 10 years ago than WebDev is today, at least for line of business apps. Imagine if every technology like that had been allowed to survive (and thrive) everywhere. Developers would have significantly more choice and we'd have much less waste in the context of finagling with the current options to accomplish what we want. > The whole Unix, designing only for the high-priesthood and everybody else be damned philosophy has probably held back computing more than anything Microsoft or Apple or Google did. For a long time I've thought a lot of open source projects are "good enough" projects sponsored by big tech to ward off competition from high quality alternatives. As some specific examples, BTRFS with the parity patches that were rejected about a decade ago because they didn't match business goals or the WinGet fiasco that killed AppGet. Those are opinions. I'm not accusing them of anything.
  - imoverclocked 3y ago
    Hindsight is 20/20; You are talking about decades of nuanced iteration and missing the fact that we all need to buy computers from someone. As soon as capitalism enters the equation, we are no longer looking at global optimums for the advancement of humanity. It could have been a lot worse too. An apt quote comes to mind, “science advances one death at a time.” I tend to think this is human nature playing out. Each generation has stalwarts that hold back progress; It’s a natural outcome of our social structure and societal norms. I would even argue that there is significant value in not advancing too fast!
ycjspjh 3y ago
It's like saying it's possible to get rid of all the predators and parasites in Nature. But for some mysterious reason Nature seems to keep them around. I think it's more about using them(and their seemingly infinite yet mindless energies) to push things in a certain direction and reigning them in when they push everyone around. Sort of like domestication of dangerous animals.
Aerbil313 3y ago
Holding back the humanity from what? Technological progress? I encourage every technophile to read Technological Slavery by Dr. David Skrbina: https://ia800300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Technological-Slavery.pdf https://ia800300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...

manvillej 3y ago

The current business strategy across the tech industry is to kill off the competition rather than compete. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, really any business. Buy the competition or undercut the market so much that they die off. Once you are a monopoly, jack up prices. Its industry standard.

dredmorbius 3y ago
This is true. This is also hardly a novel development. John D. Rockefeller based much of his business and economic worldview on the notion that competition was wasteful, and monopolies efficient. He's hardly the only well-known business figure to do so, you can find similar sentiments from, say, Peter Thiel, particularly in Zero to One. A great exploration of the general trend of established commercial enterprises and interests to oppose new arrivals and competition is Bernhard J. Stern's 1937 article Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations: <https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...> Markdown: <https://rentry.co/szi3g https://rentry.co/szi3g> I'd learned of that work through the work of Stern's student research assistant who'd done much of the literature search before going on to his own further career as a chemist and ultimately author: Isaac Asimov.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  I'd meant to note: Ron Chernow's book Titan discusses this fairly extensively, though I'd need to look up the specific page / chapter references.

anthonypasq 3y ago

> re-organized based on rewarding people that do the most to improve the planet and average quality of life Any centralized human attempt to do this has generally been a disaster, and a capitalist would argue that markets are you best shot at doing this.

donmcronald 3y ago
I would tend to agree. Oust was probably too strong of a word. It's not something you can enforce, because corruption would ruin it eventually. I'm not some luddite, and I think people should be able to get rich enough to never have to worry about money if they contribute something that increases overall global productivity by a lot more than the average person, so capitalism is probably the only realistic way to do that. Where it breaks for me is that I don't think anyone should get rewarded to the point where they're a billionaire. For example, when I estimate the human cost of a $500 million yacht, I think of it as 10k+ lifetimes of work and consider it a misuse of resources. That labor should be directed somewhere else and no one should have enough money and power to "waste" it on something as superfluous as a yacht. What I really meant is that we need changes in attitudes and education. Instead of viewing the current tech leaders as geniuses for aggregating users, limiting (or eliminating) choice, and charging for access to users, which is a cost that gets passed to those users, we need the average person to understand the damage done in terms of lost innovation, increased prices, and wasted labor. I think teaching financial literacy in schools would help a lot. People just don't understand how badly they're getting ripped off IMO.
- zx8080 3y ago
  > financial literacy Good point. But not a silver bullet: if taught badly, it only helps involving people into shady financial pyramid schemes.
babypuncher 3y ago
There's a middle ground, where we use free market effects to encourage competition and bolster progress, while not letting monopolies and other progress-stifling mechanisms take form. You can have all the benefits of a free market without also letting someone like Google have the kind of control over the internet that they do.

FredPret 3y ago

You can oust any business leader you want by out-selling them (easier said than done!) But there is one tiny upshot of the monopolistic platforms - it simplifies the go-to-market strategy for all third parties. Hardware and software vendors had a much easier time simply developing for PC for a good two decades. Now of course we have the web which makes software development even easier than that, but companies like Nvidia have a harder time dealing with multiple platforms than in a Windows-only world.

andsoitis 3y ago
I’d argue that’s a huge upshot. Countless software makers have an easier time making products with more homogeneity in the substrate.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> I often think the greed and bad acting (ex: platforms as silos) we see from tech leaders that are idolized Among my acquaintances, I honestly don't know a single person who idolizes these tech leaders. So this statement depends a lot on in which circles you spend your time/life. > I think we could do a lot better if we viewed the last 30-40 years as complete failure, ousted all of the supposed business "leaders" we have, and re-organized based on rewarding people that do the most to improve the planet and average quality of life. By your conscious buying decisions, you decide which business leader you want to reward. It's that easy.

donmcronald 3y ago
> Among my acquaintances, I honestly don't know a single person who idolizes these tech leaders. I've talked to people that think Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are going to be standing beside St. Peter at the pearly gates.
- atoav 3y ago
  Met that type as well, but the admiration (some would call it boot-licking) is just an expression of their desire to also be in that position themselves. Sometimes I wonder if such people just lack the imagination needed to see how little being in their spot would actually give them. Figures like those got who they are based on a mixture of inherited wealth, luck and a certain, probably sociopathic drive that they are inable to guard against. But crucially: happy people they are not. Just watching Elon Musk — the richest guy on earth — being less in control of his life and less secure in who he is, than me, a a former art student, is truly something to marvel at. Leading a good life is truly an art in itself, and people on a power trip are extremely rare to be good at it.
Paul-Craft 3y ago
> By your conscious buying decisions, you decide which business leader you want to reward. It's that easy. Let's not blame consumers for the bad actions of corporations, please.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> When you consider the anti-competitive, innovation stifling behavior of Microsoft in the 90s or Google/Apple today, what's the impact in terms of holding back humanity? They actually moved humanity forward. Microsoft/Apple/Google have brought computing to the masses. They made computers work for the average person. Whether from the goal to put a PC on every desk, put a powerful portable, usable computer in every pocket, and brought turn-by-turn directions to the masses. The whole Unix, designing only for the high-priesthood and everybody else be damned philosophy has probably held back computing more than anything Microsoft or Apple or Google did.

donmcronald 3y ago
> They actually moved humanity forward. Yes, that's undeniable, but what I'm saying is I think they did a bad job and that we could be further ahead. As a small example, take the time wasted on developing for IE6 because anti-competitive practices were used to prevent alternatives. What's the opportunity cost in terms of the innovation that could have been achieved if all those development hours went into something more productive than fighting with a crappy product from an entrenched incumbent? What if Apple would have embraced Java and Oracle hadn't fumbled / abandoned JavaFX? I would argue that developing with JavaFX was a better experience 10 years ago than WebDev is today, at least for line of business apps. Imagine if every technology like that had been allowed to survive (and thrive) everywhere. Developers would have significantly more choice and we'd have much less waste in the context of finagling with the current options to accomplish what we want. > The whole Unix, designing only for the high-priesthood and everybody else be damned philosophy has probably held back computing more than anything Microsoft or Apple or Google did. For a long time I've thought a lot of open source projects are "good enough" projects sponsored by big tech to ward off competition from high quality alternatives. As some specific examples, BTRFS with the parity patches that were rejected about a decade ago because they didn't match business goals or the WinGet fiasco that killed AppGet. Those are opinions. I'm not accusing them of anything.
- imoverclocked 3y ago
  Hindsight is 20/20; You are talking about decades of nuanced iteration and missing the fact that we all need to buy computers from someone. As soon as capitalism enters the equation, we are no longer looking at global optimums for the advancement of humanity. It could have been a lot worse too. An apt quote comes to mind, “science advances one death at a time.” I tend to think this is human nature playing out. Each generation has stalwarts that hold back progress; It’s a natural outcome of our social structure and societal norms. I would even argue that there is significant value in not advancing too fast!

ycjspjh 3y ago

It's like saying it's possible to get rid of all the predators and parasites in Nature. But for some mysterious reason Nature seems to keep them around. I think it's more about using them(and their seemingly infinite yet mindless energies) to push things in a certain direction and reigning them in when they push everyone around. Sort of like domestication of dangerous animals.

Aerbil313 3y ago

Holding back the humanity from what? Technological progress? I encourage every technophile to read Technological Slavery by Dr. David Skrbina: https://ia800300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Technological-Slavery.pdf https://ia800300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...