4 ms·

I never thought about this before, but product competition is basically evolution in action. Entities with more desirable traits that adapt better to a given ec

I never thought about this before, but product competition is basically evolution in action. Entities with more desirable traits that adapt better to a given ecosystem survive, the rest don't. (In addition to things like a pre-existing dominant species having advantages over new ones) (fwiw, Windows won out because it had better business strategy. Apple wanted to be in everyone's homes; Microsoft wanted to be in everyone's business. One of those is easier to sell to in bulk, and easier to charge more money. In addition, Windows being more hardware-agnostic, and encouraging an ecosystem of competing hardware manufacturers, allowed them to invest less in hardware themselves, while creating an industry that would vie for business on Microsoft's behalf. This is of course different than the "workstation" market of uber-high-powered individual computers, which sort-of still exists, though with PC hardware)

bane 2y ago
Yes! And it's very interesting to consider two additional things: 1. how seemingly "less capable" technologies win out in this evolutionary environment 2. how plentiful VC (and to some extent government funding for R&D) distorts normal "evolutionary" forces in a market
- 0134340 2y ago
  1. In that case those that were adopted tended to be the cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies, ie, at a biological level just more calorically cheaper to adopt and perhaps efficient to maintain. 2. VC and general funding, ie supporting an entity, is a feature of evolution. I guess I expected better of HN but it seems people don't realize that nothing we can do will stop evolution and everything we do is just a feature of it.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  Yeah; I think it's our ego, or "common sense", that makes us think that the most advanced thing will win out in the end. In reality it's the most well-adapted thing that wins out in the long term. If you ever see a thing and think "this is really advanced, this must be the future", think again. I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. The economy is the climate, and the laws, politics, people, culture are the landscape. That ecosystem includes VCs along with all the other things. Within that environment, the best adapted thing survives. Sadly, that "thing" (a corporation, for example) may make poor decisions that lead to its demise, the way a snow leopard leaping for a goat on a mountain side may make them both tumble to their doom. Nature's a cruel mistress. I could even see something like Soviet Russia being an ecosystem that evolution still happens in. It's a very extreme environment, to be sure, but evolution still happens in the most extreme environments on earth.
  - bane 2y ago
    > I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. I'm definitely not claiming that evolution doesn't occur, but that the temporary supply of capital that VCs (and similar sources) supply creates an artificial environment that creates distorted evolutionary pressures. When the VC money runs out, and technologies are "returned to a natural ecosystem", the end result is often not that the VC funded tech was the fittest in the market. Meanwhile, if a particular technology consumed the market by distorting its fitness function and eliminates otherwise healthy competitors along the way, the VC backed tech might survive in the end, but it's not clear that it would be the fittest given natural market forces. However, everybody else is dead. To really stretch this analogy, it's a bit like an environment with several predatory cat species - each good at a particular strategy. One day a team of hunters comes in, kills all the prey, and selects a specific cat species as "the champion" and simply feeds it in captivity. Once the rest of the cat species die off, they release the champion into the wild where lack of competition stalls its own further evolution. What cat would have been the "best" in the given ecosystem? Nobody knows. There's a few interesting cases around this. Palantir comes to mind as a particularly useful case. They entered a market with a dozen competitors all surviving in the market, flooded it with something like 13 or 14 rounds of fundraising's worth of product, nearly annihilated everybody else in the market and when finally released to the wild, found that their signature product line was no longer what the market wanted at the size of the market the VCs had assumed. Today the company more or less acts as a bespoke web application company. Mimic competitors like C3.ai are also suffering under similar fates. For a government funded use-case look no further than the space launch market. For decades it was funded by dumb government money and regulations that gave the appearance of a competitive market but was intended more to ensure strategic options. Those companies evolved/optimized to capture this steady supply of crippled prey money but it really created a bunch of sick, inbred, organizations. SpaceX appears, acts like a hungry wild tiger in a room full of Pugs and proceeds to dismantle them all, while building new markets and capturing the easy prey dripping out of the government funnel. There's no magic physics to SpaceX, all of the competencies existed in the industrial pipeline, but the government funding mechanism evolved them in unnatural ways. SpaceX, being heavily government funded, may yet evolve into one of those, but for the moment it's the difference between a Wolf and a domesticated small apartment dog.
acdha 2y ago
Windows also won by parasitizing a previously bigger host (Bill Gates’ mother was on IBM’s board), and shutting out competition by forcing vendors not to offer other companies’ software if they wanted Microsoft licenses at better than retail pricing.
- inquirerGeneral 2y ago
  [dead]
- nine_k 2y ago
  This is how MS-DOS and early Windows won. But the first version of MS Excel was written for MacOS. And it's MSO what's holding businesses on Windows, not the other way around.
  - orionblastar 2y ago
    MSO doesn't work in WINE at least the latest versions don't.
    - smegger001 2y ago
      I recall being told that office uses undocumented Windows APIs making it harder for groups like WINE and Proton to support them. whether or not thats the intent or a happy accident well...
- canucker2016 2y ago
  Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, was not an IBM board member. She was on the national United Way's executive committee. Also an executive committee member was IBM's Chairman, John Opel. see https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-... [edit] also Windows OEMs always got lower than retail price for Windows licenses (assuming your volume sold was high enough) from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#The_%22Windows_tax%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#... : ==== Microsoft once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included. Beginning in 1983, Microsoft sold MS-DOS licenses to OEMs on an individually negotiated basis. The contracts required OEMs to purchase a number of MS-DOS licenses equal to or greater than the number of computers sold, with the result of zero marginal cost for OEMs to include MS-DOS. Installing an operating system other than MS-DOS would effectively require double payment of operating system royalties. Also, Microsoft penalized OEMs that installed alternative operating systems by making their license terms less favorable. Microsoft entered into a consent decree in 1994 that barred them from conditioning the availability of Windows licenses or varying their prices based on whether OEMs distributed other operating systems. ... In 2009, Microsoft stated that it has always charged OEMs about $50 for a Windows license on a $1,000 computer. ====
0134340 2y ago
And entities that become too great and harmful to other entities (monopolistic) get challenged, even if they can provide some good, and from that challenge they sometimes get parasitized as well. Business competition, therefore human behavior, is natural no matter what way you want to politicize it.
hedora 2y ago
I first figured this out when looking at filesystems. Ext4 is a generation behind netapp wafl (from the 1990s). ZFS is arguably competitive with some of the enterprise filers from back when sun existed. There have been at least four generations of commercial filesystems since then. So, a randomly chosen on-prem filer will be 3-5 generations ahead of Linux. The reason is economic: In that space, companies have a half life of 5 years, but influential open source filesystems last 20+ years.
- ghaff 2y ago
  ZFS would almost certainly be more widely adopted were it under a different license. But Red Hat, for one, wasn't going to touch it given CDDL.
makeitdouble 2y ago
We're talking about international trade, so trade barriers and foreign policies play a huge role that go beyond simple competition. Japan had a hell of a time to deal with car exports in the US, SONY still won but the reaction to it was also extremely strong. A Japanese company had absolutely no chance to go hit the US market and displace companies like SUN, Apple or IBM on the US soil. In particular software IP is a whole lot harder to fight for than manufacturing IP (even if it gets stolen, it's moot if it can't be physically applied. In software land reproduction is a given) Europe wasn't much an easier target either. We saw that later with docomo failing miserably while having a clearly superior product. In reverse the US has a long history of opening the Japanese market when they really want to, and forgoing that market isn't critical either, so there's quite an asymmetry. The only ground Japanese company learned to properly fight has been video games so far.
- mcdow 2y ago
  Could you speak more to the US “opening the Japanese market when they really want to”? I’m not familiar with this.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    A bit far from the technology related fields, but the beef import agreements are the most explicit on this part [0]. US beef was found in clear violation of the safety rules multiple times, but Japan had to bend anyway ("The government has put priority on the political schedule between the two countries, not on food safety or human health."). Japan is typically not doing great in its relationship with Korea or China, or even India, nor the EU really (France and Germany are closely friendly, but won't give much economic benefits), so the US have a pretty strong leverage when it comes to negociations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_Japan#:~:text=After%20multiple%20beef%20import%20restrictions%20in%20Japan%2C%20the,to%20a%20single%20BSE%20case%20in%20Washington.%20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_... PS: there's a mountain of other reasons now, but Japan and Russia were also not doing great as they've been fighting over the northern islands for decades. To my eyes they really really suck at international relations in general.
  - 2y ago

bane 2y ago

Yes! And it's very interesting to consider two additional things: 1. how seemingly "less capable" technologies win out in this evolutionary environment 2. how plentiful VC (and to some extent government funding for R&D) distorts normal "evolutionary" forces in a market

0134340 2y ago
1. In that case those that were adopted tended to be the cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies, ie, at a biological level just more calorically cheaper to adopt and perhaps efficient to maintain. 2. VC and general funding, ie supporting an entity, is a feature of evolution. I guess I expected better of HN but it seems people don't realize that nothing we can do will stop evolution and everything we do is just a feature of it.
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
Yeah; I think it's our ego, or "common sense", that makes us think that the most advanced thing will win out in the end. In reality it's the most well-adapted thing that wins out in the long term. If you ever see a thing and think "this is really advanced, this must be the future", think again. I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. The economy is the climate, and the laws, politics, people, culture are the landscape. That ecosystem includes VCs along with all the other things. Within that environment, the best adapted thing survives. Sadly, that "thing" (a corporation, for example) may make poor decisions that lead to its demise, the way a snow leopard leaping for a goat on a mountain side may make them both tumble to their doom. Nature's a cruel mistress. I could even see something like Soviet Russia being an ecosystem that evolution still happens in. It's a very extreme environment, to be sure, but evolution still happens in the most extreme environments on earth.
- bane 2y ago
  > I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. I'm definitely not claiming that evolution doesn't occur, but that the temporary supply of capital that VCs (and similar sources) supply creates an artificial environment that creates distorted evolutionary pressures. When the VC money runs out, and technologies are "returned to a natural ecosystem", the end result is often not that the VC funded tech was the fittest in the market. Meanwhile, if a particular technology consumed the market by distorting its fitness function and eliminates otherwise healthy competitors along the way, the VC backed tech might survive in the end, but it's not clear that it would be the fittest given natural market forces. However, everybody else is dead. To really stretch this analogy, it's a bit like an environment with several predatory cat species - each good at a particular strategy. One day a team of hunters comes in, kills all the prey, and selects a specific cat species as "the champion" and simply feeds it in captivity. Once the rest of the cat species die off, they release the champion into the wild where lack of competition stalls its own further evolution. What cat would have been the "best" in the given ecosystem? Nobody knows. There's a few interesting cases around this. Palantir comes to mind as a particularly useful case. They entered a market with a dozen competitors all surviving in the market, flooded it with something like 13 or 14 rounds of fundraising's worth of product, nearly annihilated everybody else in the market and when finally released to the wild, found that their signature product line was no longer what the market wanted at the size of the market the VCs had assumed. Today the company more or less acts as a bespoke web application company. Mimic competitors like C3.ai are also suffering under similar fates. For a government funded use-case look no further than the space launch market. For decades it was funded by dumb government money and regulations that gave the appearance of a competitive market but was intended more to ensure strategic options. Those companies evolved/optimized to capture this steady supply of crippled prey money but it really created a bunch of sick, inbred, organizations. SpaceX appears, acts like a hungry wild tiger in a room full of Pugs and proceeds to dismantle them all, while building new markets and capturing the easy prey dripping out of the government funnel. There's no magic physics to SpaceX, all of the competencies existed in the industrial pipeline, but the government funding mechanism evolved them in unnatural ways. SpaceX, being heavily government funded, may yet evolve into one of those, but for the moment it's the difference between a Wolf and a domesticated small apartment dog.

acdha 2y ago

Windows also won by parasitizing a previously bigger host (Bill Gates’ mother was on IBM’s board), and shutting out competition by forcing vendors not to offer other companies’ software if they wanted Microsoft licenses at better than retail pricing.

inquirerGeneral 2y ago
[dead]
nine_k 2y ago
This is how MS-DOS and early Windows won. But the first version of MS Excel was written for MacOS. And it's MSO what's holding businesses on Windows, not the other way around.
- orionblastar 2y ago
  MSO doesn't work in WINE at least the latest versions don't.
  - smegger001 2y ago
    I recall being told that office uses undocumented Windows APIs making it harder for groups like WINE and Proton to support them. whether or not thats the intent or a happy accident well...
canucker2016 2y ago
Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, was not an IBM board member. She was on the national United Way's executive committee. Also an executive committee member was IBM's Chairman, John Opel. see https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-... [edit] also Windows OEMs always got lower than retail price for Windows licenses (assuming your volume sold was high enough) from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#The_%22Windows_tax%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#... : ==== Microsoft once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included. Beginning in 1983, Microsoft sold MS-DOS licenses to OEMs on an individually negotiated basis. The contracts required OEMs to purchase a number of MS-DOS licenses equal to or greater than the number of computers sold, with the result of zero marginal cost for OEMs to include MS-DOS. Installing an operating system other than MS-DOS would effectively require double payment of operating system royalties. Also, Microsoft penalized OEMs that installed alternative operating systems by making their license terms less favorable. Microsoft entered into a consent decree in 1994 that barred them from conditioning the availability of Windows licenses or varying their prices based on whether OEMs distributed other operating systems. ... In 2009, Microsoft stated that it has always charged OEMs about $50 for a Windows license on a $1,000 computer. ====

0134340 2y ago

And entities that become too great and harmful to other entities (monopolistic) get challenged, even if they can provide some good, and from that challenge they sometimes get parasitized as well. Business competition, therefore human behavior, is natural no matter what way you want to politicize it.

hedora 2y ago

I first figured this out when looking at filesystems. Ext4 is a generation behind netapp wafl (from the 1990s). ZFS is arguably competitive with some of the enterprise filers from back when sun existed. There have been at least four generations of commercial filesystems since then. So, a randomly chosen on-prem filer will be 3-5 generations ahead of Linux. The reason is economic: In that space, companies have a half life of 5 years, but influential open source filesystems last 20+ years.

ghaff 2y ago
ZFS would almost certainly be more widely adopted were it under a different license. But Red Hat, for one, wasn't going to touch it given CDDL.

makeitdouble 2y ago

We're talking about international trade, so trade barriers and foreign policies play a huge role that go beyond simple competition. Japan had a hell of a time to deal with car exports in the US, SONY still won but the reaction to it was also extremely strong. A Japanese company had absolutely no chance to go hit the US market and displace companies like SUN, Apple or IBM on the US soil. In particular software IP is a whole lot harder to fight for than manufacturing IP (even if it gets stolen, it's moot if it can't be physically applied. In software land reproduction is a given) Europe wasn't much an easier target either. We saw that later with docomo failing miserably while having a clearly superior product. In reverse the US has a long history of opening the Japanese market when they really want to, and forgoing that market isn't critical either, so there's quite an asymmetry. The only ground Japanese company learned to properly fight has been video games so far.

mcdow 2y ago
Could you speak more to the US “opening the Japanese market when they really want to”? I’m not familiar with this.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  A bit far from the technology related fields, but the beef import agreements are the most explicit on this part [0]. US beef was found in clear violation of the safety rules multiple times, but Japan had to bend anyway ("The government has put priority on the political schedule between the two countries, not on food safety or human health."). Japan is typically not doing great in its relationship with Korea or China, or even India, nor the EU really (France and Germany are closely friendly, but won't give much economic benefits), so the US have a pretty strong leverage when it comes to negociations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_Japan#:~:text=After%20multiple%20beef%20import%20restrictions%20in%20Japan%2C%20the,to%20a%20single%20BSE%20case%20in%20Washington.%20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_... PS: there's a mountain of other reasons now, but Japan and Russia were also not doing great as they've been fighting over the northern islands for decades. To my eyes they really really suck at international relations in general.
- 2y ago