4 ms·

You Can't "Win" in Tech Unless You Cheat

35 points by midzer 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nickv 2y ago
Notwithstanding modern time, Google is notably absent in this article because it provides a good counter to it.
- esafak 2y ago
  And Amazon didn't break the rules any more than its maligned and bigger competitor, Walmart. Am I wrong? I think they grew by running a tight ship.
  - throwawaysleep 2y ago
    Amazon breaks "Deploying capital as a weapon." Basically their entire shopping ecosystem didn't make money for years and years and years.
    - esafak 2y ago
      Because they plowed their revenues back into the company, using their capital productively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiJXb8S58o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiJXb8S58o
  - disambiguation 2y ago
    Amazon is the poster child for cheat to win. They grew fat by circumventing state sales tax for many years. "Amazon.com originally collected sales tax only from five states as of 2011, but as of April 2017 collects sales taxes from customers in all 45 states that have a state sales tax"
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - toast0 2y ago
      Case law at the time was that mail order sales didn't need to collect sales tax unless there was a nexus in the state. Amazon may have done some funny business to claim no nexus in some states, I seem to recall allegations that had Kindle development in the Bay Area under a subsidiary and didn't pay sales tax in California. But mostly, they kept their warehouses and distribution centers outside states they didn't want to pay sales tax to, and that followed case law (but case law changed when it was relitigated)
      - pentel-0_5 2y ago
        IANAL, but SCOTUS finally decided "every business must pay sales tax everywhere" in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., 585 U.S. ___ (2018).[0] (Where ___ has a preliminary value of 162.[1]) 0. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/585/17-494/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/585/17-494/ 1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/preliminaryprint/585US1PP_final.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/preliminaryprint/585US...
      - disambiguation 2y ago
        Sure it wasn't exactly foul play, but it was a major legal exploit that has since been patched. If the exploit didn't exist in the first place, then Amazon probably wouldn't either.
        wavemode 2y ago
        I don't think there's any evidence that this is true. Avoiding sales tax is nice, but it's -not- the reason online retail took over the world.
        disambiguation 2y ago
        Outside of math, science, and law, proof and evidence are tricky words. Instead I merely offer a quote for your consideration, from Brad Stone's book The Everything Store (2013): """ Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle because of the city’s reputation as a technology hub and because the state of Washington had a relatively small population (compared to California, New York, and Texas), which meant that Amazon would have to collect state sales tax from only a minor percentage of customers…. [T]he University of Washington produced a steady stream of computer science graduates. Seattle was also close to one of the two big book distributors: Ingram had a warehouse a six-hour drive away, in Roseburg, Oregon """ In other words, Bezos was well aware of the sales tax advantage from the start.
- throwawaysleep 2y ago
  Do they? I thought they break "misusing user trust". Google is the ultimate surveillance capitalism engine. They also regularly get in trouble for anti trust.
- siliconc0w 2y ago
  Google is actually a pretty good example. They provided a lot of value initially but now any remotely commercial query has only sponsored links above the fold. If you want to sell anything on the internet, you're probably paying them or facebook a hefty vig. They also used their position in search to push their other products, they make you pay to buy keywords for your own trademarks, they aggressively track you in order to build an advertising profile, etc, etc. Enshittification is well documented in tech. There is some initial value or innovation and then it always turns into gatekeeping and value extraction.
827a 2y ago
Boring, yawn, etc. Every mega-successful company ever lied, cheated, and stole their way to the top. That's how they win. Do you think Standard Oil and JP Morgan was a paragon of ethics? Why do you think tech would be any different? The article doesn't make any new or unique points against tech as an industry, its just making boring socioeconomic commentary on how every human system has worked, ever. The CIA literally overthrew the democratically elected leader of Guatemala to protect the interests of an American banana company. But, Paypal paying their users $10 to sign up is spooky, yeah.
- amunozo 2y ago
  What I understand from here is that these companies, that are praised as innovative, do not grow by innovation, but cheating.
throwawaysleep 2y ago
> While Silicon Valley plays Monopoly, a parallel universe is growing in the shadows. Developers building open-source tools that generate $50k monthly. Newsletter writers earning more than startup CEOs. Product creators who never touch venture capital but build sustainable wealth. I mean, have any of these truly won yet? It seems to early to tell.
- mickael-kerjean 2y ago
  This is what I'm trying to do since 2017 [1], except the earning are merely 5k a month. From what I can see around me, the rate of oss dev who make a living out of their project is similar to amateur / pro football player, with the big star everyone talk about, namely redhat & gitlab. I only know personally 1 other oss dev who is doing better but still way under what you get working for someone else If you're doing oss and managed to get things to work, please reach out to me, I'd love to talk to you. [1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
toast0 2y ago
> PayPal started by paying people to sign up. Their viral growth came from essentially bribing users with $10 to join and $10 for each referral. That’s not innovation — it’s buying market share with venture capital. Traditional banks used to give out toasters. My credit union gave my kid a piggy bank and regularly offers referral bonuses. Paying people to sign up is an advertising expense. Having a useful product is what keeps people around. Spending the advertising budget to get users before the product is ready to keep users and provide a return is a pretty easy mistake for lots of products. If this was the biggest dirt they decided to write about, I don't think they dug very far. I think PayPal avoided getting banking or money transmitting license for quite some time, which would be more in line with the title of the article. There's lots of reports of at least untransparent, if not unfair account closures and it's credibly claimed that PayPal does not return account balances in a timely fashion in these cases either. Similar with the amazon complaint. There's got to be something better to complain about that they invested investor money in building a business that needed continual invesment until they found their niche.
- pentel-0_5 2y ago
  Michael Moore found banks that gave out rifles. At small scale, demand must be incentivized, even if that means temporarily dropping the price below zero to reach sufficient scale to be self-sustaining.
wavemode 2y ago
The title of this article does not align with its actual content. A more accurate (albeit less enticing) title would've been "Some companies in tech win by cheating. Some do not. Which will you choose?"
- pentel-0_5 2y ago
  Agreed. It makes out tech to be a static, malicious, and socially-Darwinian hivemind of freeloading scofflaws. There are nonzero people in tech who do live their and work towards values with integrity that exist on a spectrum including from democratic socialism leanings all the way to including nearly Marxism. If you want to be at least moderately successful on a long time horizon, it is required to both be and appear to be honest and to have integrity.
natdempk 2y ago
> See the pattern? The biggest tech successes of our era didn’t win through superior technology or innovation. - PayPal won by creating technology that makes it easier / possible than any alternative to send and receive money via the internet. - Uber won through creating an app that lets you hail a ride and creating a marketplace for that. - Airbnb won through innovating on the social idea of paying someone and creating a marketplace for that. - Facebook won through creating an innovative social networking technology and creating an ad marketplace on top of that. - Amazon won through creating an innovative website and marketplace for goods that offered innovations to the consumer like quick shipping times and risk-free purchases via easy returns. - Tesla won through literally creating a product (EV) and charging network for EVs that people are willing to pay for. This article is arguing in bad faith. All of these services won because they created something that solved a problem and created value for millions or billions of people, either making plenty of money along the way, or with high potential to make money at any given point in time. If this is cheating, then all of capitalism and the innovations that scale and improve life for the world via capitalism are all "cheating". Build something people want and whatnot.

35 points by midzer 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nickv 2y ago

Notwithstanding modern time, Google is notably absent in this article because it provides a good counter to it.

esafak 2y ago
And Amazon didn't break the rules any more than its maligned and bigger competitor, Walmart. Am I wrong? I think they grew by running a tight ship.
- throwawaysleep 2y ago
  Amazon breaks "Deploying capital as a weapon." Basically their entire shopping ecosystem didn't make money for years and years and years.
  - esafak 2y ago
    Because they plowed their revenues back into the company, using their capital productively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiJXb8S58o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiJXb8S58o
- disambiguation 2y ago
  Amazon is the poster child for cheat to win. They grew fat by circumventing state sales tax for many years. "Amazon.com originally collected sales tax only from five states as of 2011, but as of April 2017 collects sales taxes from customers in all 45 states that have a state sales tax"
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - toast0 2y ago
    Case law at the time was that mail order sales didn't need to collect sales tax unless there was a nexus in the state. Amazon may have done some funny business to claim no nexus in some states, I seem to recall allegations that had Kindle development in the Bay Area under a subsidiary and didn't pay sales tax in California. But mostly, they kept their warehouses and distribution centers outside states they didn't want to pay sales tax to, and that followed case law (but case law changed when it was relitigated)
    - pentel-0_5 2y ago
      IANAL, but SCOTUS finally decided "every business must pay sales tax everywhere" in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., 585 U.S. ___ (2018).[0] (Where ___ has a preliminary value of 162.[1]) 0. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/585/17-494/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/585/17-494/ 1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/preliminaryprint/585US1PP_final.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/preliminaryprint/585US...
    - disambiguation 2y ago
      Sure it wasn't exactly foul play, but it was a major legal exploit that has since been patched. If the exploit didn't exist in the first place, then Amazon probably wouldn't either.
      - wavemode 2y ago
        I don't think there's any evidence that this is true. Avoiding sales tax is nice, but it's -not- the reason online retail took over the world.
        disambiguation 2y ago
        Outside of math, science, and law, proof and evidence are tricky words. Instead I merely offer a quote for your consideration, from Brad Stone's book The Everything Store (2013): """ Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle because of the city’s reputation as a technology hub and because the state of Washington had a relatively small population (compared to California, New York, and Texas), which meant that Amazon would have to collect state sales tax from only a minor percentage of customers…. [T]he University of Washington produced a steady stream of computer science graduates. Seattle was also close to one of the two big book distributors: Ingram had a warehouse a six-hour drive away, in Roseburg, Oregon """ In other words, Bezos was well aware of the sales tax advantage from the start.
throwawaysleep 2y ago
Do they? I thought they break "misusing user trust". Google is the ultimate surveillance capitalism engine. They also regularly get in trouble for anti trust.
siliconc0w 2y ago
Google is actually a pretty good example. They provided a lot of value initially but now any remotely commercial query has only sponsored links above the fold. If you want to sell anything on the internet, you're probably paying them or facebook a hefty vig. They also used their position in search to push their other products, they make you pay to buy keywords for your own trademarks, they aggressively track you in order to build an advertising profile, etc, etc. Enshittification is well documented in tech. There is some initial value or innovation and then it always turns into gatekeeping and value extraction.

827a 2y ago

Boring, yawn, etc. Every mega-successful company ever lied, cheated, and stole their way to the top. That's how they win. Do you think Standard Oil and JP Morgan was a paragon of ethics? Why do you think tech would be any different? The article doesn't make any new or unique points against tech as an industry, its just making boring socioeconomic commentary on how every human system has worked, ever. The CIA literally overthrew the democratically elected leader of Guatemala to protect the interests of an American banana company. But, Paypal paying their users $10 to sign up is spooky, yeah.

amunozo 2y ago
What I understand from here is that these companies, that are praised as innovative, do not grow by innovation, but cheating.

throwawaysleep 2y ago

> While Silicon Valley plays Monopoly, a parallel universe is growing in the shadows. Developers building open-source tools that generate $50k monthly. Newsletter writers earning more than startup CEOs. Product creators who never touch venture capital but build sustainable wealth. I mean, have any of these truly won yet? It seems to early to tell.

mickael-kerjean 2y ago
This is what I'm trying to do since 2017 [1], except the earning are merely 5k a month. From what I can see around me, the rate of oss dev who make a living out of their project is similar to amateur / pro football player, with the big star everyone talk about, namely redhat & gitlab. I only know personally 1 other oss dev who is doing better but still way under what you get working for someone else If you're doing oss and managed to get things to work, please reach out to me, I'd love to talk to you. [1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

toast0 2y ago

> PayPal started by paying people to sign up. Their viral growth came from essentially bribing users with $10 to join and $10 for each referral. That’s not innovation — it’s buying market share with venture capital. Traditional banks used to give out toasters. My credit union gave my kid a piggy bank and regularly offers referral bonuses. Paying people to sign up is an advertising expense. Having a useful product is what keeps people around. Spending the advertising budget to get users before the product is ready to keep users and provide a return is a pretty easy mistake for lots of products. If this was the biggest dirt they decided to write about, I don't think they dug very far. I think PayPal avoided getting banking or money transmitting license for quite some time, which would be more in line with the title of the article. There's lots of reports of at least untransparent, if not unfair account closures and it's credibly claimed that PayPal does not return account balances in a timely fashion in these cases either. Similar with the amazon complaint. There's got to be something better to complain about that they invested investor money in building a business that needed continual invesment until they found their niche.

pentel-0_5 2y ago
Michael Moore found banks that gave out rifles. At small scale, demand must be incentivized, even if that means temporarily dropping the price below zero to reach sufficient scale to be self-sustaining.

wavemode 2y ago

The title of this article does not align with its actual content. A more accurate (albeit less enticing) title would've been "Some companies in tech win by cheating. Some do not. Which will you choose?"

pentel-0_5 2y ago
Agreed. It makes out tech to be a static, malicious, and socially-Darwinian hivemind of freeloading scofflaws. There are nonzero people in tech who do live their and work towards values with integrity that exist on a spectrum including from democratic socialism leanings all the way to including nearly Marxism. If you want to be at least moderately successful on a long time horizon, it is required to both be and appear to be honest and to have integrity.

natdempk 2y ago

> See the pattern? The biggest tech successes of our era didn’t win through superior technology or innovation. - PayPal won by creating technology that makes it easier / possible than any alternative to send and receive money via the internet. - Uber won through creating an app that lets you hail a ride and creating a marketplace for that. - Airbnb won through innovating on the social idea of paying someone and creating a marketplace for that. - Facebook won through creating an innovative social networking technology and creating an ad marketplace on top of that. - Amazon won through creating an innovative website and marketplace for goods that offered innovations to the consumer like quick shipping times and risk-free purchases via easy returns. - Tesla won through literally creating a product (EV) and charging network for EVs that people are willing to pay for. This article is arguing in bad faith. All of these services won because they created something that solved a problem and created value for millions or billions of people, either making plenty of money along the way, or with high potential to make money at any given point in time. If this is cheating, then all of capitalism and the innovations that scale and improve life for the world via capitalism are all "cheating". Build something people want and whatnot.