3 ms·

> As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug Cope much? As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries

by qsort 2y ago

> As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug Cope much? As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago
>As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.
- huntertwo 2y ago
  What a free society that would be!
  - palata 2y ago
    I don't get this interpretation of "free". Would you say that one should be "free" to kill someone else? Nobody wants absolute freedom. We all want some set of rules (e.g. "You should not be allowed to burn my house for fun"). Of course, we may want rules that benefit us personally ("Taxes should be paid to me personally, not to the country"), but that obviously doesn't work (if taxes are paid exclusively to me, they can't be paid exclusively to you). So as a group, we agree on a set of rules that benefits society the most. We want to "maximize the global utility", if I can say it like this. If "not having unicorns" is better for the society at large than "having unicorns", then it works. And your short-sighted, convenient understanding of "freedom" doesn't change that.
    - huntertwo 2y ago
      How would you restrict the existence of unicorns? Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument. Edit: my implicit argument is that restricting unicorns while sounds nice on paper is that the net benefit of an implementation of that is net negative - not that absolute anarchy is the solution.
      - palata 2y ago
        > Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument. Because your sarcasm was constructive, maybe? > my implicit argument is that Next time, maybe consider making it explicit and without using sarcasm. My explicit answer was that if you consider that regulations are fundamentally against freedom, then I disagree. To me, it's perfectly fine to regulate unicorns if we believe it is better for the society. You can disagree with the fact that it would be better for society, but that's not what you said. What you said is that regulating against unicorns would be against freedom.
      - abenga 2y ago
        > How would you restrict the existence of unicorns? Enact and enforce anti trust laws.
  - exe34 2y ago
    Truly! imagine if international trade was controlled for the benefit of the people instead of a pump and dump operation for the oligarchy!
    - huntertwo 2y ago
      My mistake, I forgot you could either ban both unicorns and pump and dumps or ban neither! How could I be so dumb!
      - exe34 2y ago
        What would a ban even look like in the US? who would enforce it? if it profits the republican party, then there's no government agency left to enforce laws against that.
        huntertwo 2y ago
        The president has a meme coin I think we’re going to get a painful reminder of why we have so many financial laws soon.
      - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
        I must point out that you introduced the word "ban." I did not. I don't even know what "banning Unicorns" means, or how that would work. I said, "Unicorns are a problem and should not exist." I suspect that regulation that protects competition and the free market is a pretty effective way of preventing Unicorns from arising in the first place.
        huntertwo 2y ago
        That is my mistake - I misinterpreted. In my mind, regulations preventing unicorns (I.e statups > 1B in valuation) would require restricting personal decisions on where to invest money based on size. Protecting competition or free markets IMO would not succeed in preventing unicorns but maybe there is a plan that could work.
  - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    A society with competition? Yes, indeed, that would be a more free society.
whstl 2y ago
I don't see why one needs a trillion-dollar company to host a website. I'd rather have neither.
- RestlessMind 2y ago
  > I don't see why... People need a trillion-dollar company for even simpler tasks like exchanging messages with their friends and families. Why? Because the UX and reliability of that option is superior to anything else. Which of course means Billions of users flock to that service. Which brings insane revenue and economies of scale. Which can be invested into improving the UX and reliability further than the competitors. Now the company has a big moat around its business and a Trillion dollar valuation.
  - whstl 2y ago
    Pure bullshit rationalization. UXs of big tech are often full of dark-patterns, they're constantly copying from or acquiring smaller players, and they're only growing because of network effects.
    - RestlessMind 2y ago
      Pray tell me what are the dark patterns in WhatsApp. My entire circle uses it purely because it is the best app out there. Signal, iMessage or Google's dozen or so chat apps do not come anywhere close.
      - whstl 1y ago
        Pray tell why you need to cherry-pick examples in your arguments. Just because you consider ONE product from a large company good, doesn't make every single big tech product the same. Meta is from a completely different sector from the one I was talking about, and its other two money-making main products are riddled with tracking and dark-patterns. My point stands: nobody needs a trillion-dollar company to host a website.
sham1 2y ago
To be fair, this doesn't really require these sorts of trillion euro unicorns to achieve, although it really is sad to see our industries be reliant on a regime that may turn hostile at the drop of a hat. We need to do better, but it should probably be done in our own terms.
rcarmo 2y ago
As a Microsoft employee who spent 25 years in telco before joining and was very much into the enterprise hosting scene, let me tell you that nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services. Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship. Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those). It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver. And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.
- qsort 2y ago
  > nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services I agree. But that's the long-term problem to fix. Getting into bar fights or rambling about how we are So Much More Moral and So Much Better than everyone else isn't going to make the EU more competitive.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Yep. But all the informal chats I've had over the years across Europe (from Greece to the Nordics) point to no change whatsoever because even though we have more and more sovereignty concerns there is zero interest from national governments in truly invest in anything but showy stuff that will bring immediate cashbacks -- like 5G licensing, which also taxed telcos and infrastructure providers heavily without any real return (and thus soaked up any mindshare/cash they might have to improve the hosting situation).
- pjc50 2y ago
  I think that some of this is an inherently Telco problem. The same reason as the US internet isn't dominated by AT&T, and the X25 etc series of protocols lost to the internet ones.
exe34 2y ago
Hertzer in Europe is pretty good, but they don't have first mover advantage and they haven't got as much control of mindshare in governments. A lot of people only discovered their existence once the US went to the dark side.
- omnimus 2y ago
  Technically many of these server/hosting companies were in the market first. Hetzner is older than AWS. Mailbox is like 10 years older than gmail/google. So the US companies are the ones who didnt have first mover advantage.
  - exe34 2y ago
    I meant at hyperscaling. AWS was already doing it with their own servers, so they had both the producer and consumer working in one place to expand out.
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      Hetzner is not a hyperscaler.

by qsort 2y ago

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

>As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.

huntertwo 2y ago
What a free society that would be!
- palata 2y ago
  I don't get this interpretation of "free". Would you say that one should be "free" to kill someone else? Nobody wants absolute freedom. We all want some set of rules (e.g. "You should not be allowed to burn my house for fun"). Of course, we may want rules that benefit us personally ("Taxes should be paid to me personally, not to the country"), but that obviously doesn't work (if taxes are paid exclusively to me, they can't be paid exclusively to you). So as a group, we agree on a set of rules that benefits society the most. We want to "maximize the global utility", if I can say it like this. If "not having unicorns" is better for the society at large than "having unicorns", then it works. And your short-sighted, convenient understanding of "freedom" doesn't change that.
  - huntertwo 2y ago
    How would you restrict the existence of unicorns? Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument. Edit: my implicit argument is that restricting unicorns while sounds nice on paper is that the net benefit of an implementation of that is net negative - not that absolute anarchy is the solution.
    - palata 2y ago
      > Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument. Because your sarcasm was constructive, maybe? > my implicit argument is that Next time, maybe consider making it explicit and without using sarcasm. My explicit answer was that if you consider that regulations are fundamentally against freedom, then I disagree. To me, it's perfectly fine to regulate unicorns if we believe it is better for the society. You can disagree with the fact that it would be better for society, but that's not what you said. What you said is that regulating against unicorns would be against freedom.
    - abenga 2y ago
      > How would you restrict the existence of unicorns? Enact and enforce anti trust laws.
- exe34 2y ago
  Truly! imagine if international trade was controlled for the benefit of the people instead of a pump and dump operation for the oligarchy!
  - huntertwo 2y ago
    My mistake, I forgot you could either ban both unicorns and pump and dumps or ban neither! How could I be so dumb!
    - exe34 2y ago
      What would a ban even look like in the US? who would enforce it? if it profits the republican party, then there's no government agency left to enforce laws against that.
      - huntertwo 2y ago
        The president has a meme coin I think we’re going to get a painful reminder of why we have so many financial laws soon.
    - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
      I must point out that you introduced the word "ban." I did not. I don't even know what "banning Unicorns" means, or how that would work. I said, "Unicorns are a problem and should not exist." I suspect that regulation that protects competition and the free market is a pretty effective way of preventing Unicorns from arising in the first place.
      - huntertwo 2y ago
        That is my mistake - I misinterpreted. In my mind, regulations preventing unicorns (I.e statups > 1B in valuation) would require restricting personal decisions on where to invest money based on size. Protecting competition or free markets IMO would not succeed in preventing unicorns but maybe there is a plan that could work.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  A society with competition? Yes, indeed, that would be a more free society.

whstl 2y ago

I don't see why one needs a trillion-dollar company to host a website. I'd rather have neither.

RestlessMind 2y ago
> I don't see why... People need a trillion-dollar company for even simpler tasks like exchanging messages with their friends and families. Why? Because the UX and reliability of that option is superior to anything else. Which of course means Billions of users flock to that service. Which brings insane revenue and economies of scale. Which can be invested into improving the UX and reliability further than the competitors. Now the company has a big moat around its business and a Trillion dollar valuation.
- whstl 2y ago
  Pure bullshit rationalization. UXs of big tech are often full of dark-patterns, they're constantly copying from or acquiring smaller players, and they're only growing because of network effects.
  - RestlessMind 2y ago
    Pray tell me what are the dark patterns in WhatsApp. My entire circle uses it purely because it is the best app out there. Signal, iMessage or Google's dozen or so chat apps do not come anywhere close.
    - whstl 1y ago
      Pray tell why you need to cherry-pick examples in your arguments. Just because you consider ONE product from a large company good, doesn't make every single big tech product the same. Meta is from a completely different sector from the one I was talking about, and its other two money-making main products are riddled with tracking and dark-patterns. My point stands: nobody needs a trillion-dollar company to host a website.

sham1 2y ago

To be fair, this doesn't really require these sorts of trillion euro unicorns to achieve, although it really is sad to see our industries be reliant on a regime that may turn hostile at the drop of a hat. We need to do better, but it should probably be done in our own terms.

rcarmo 2y ago

As a Microsoft employee who spent 25 years in telco before joining and was very much into the enterprise hosting scene, let me tell you that nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services. Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship. Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those). It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver. And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.

qsort 2y ago
> nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services I agree. But that's the long-term problem to fix. Getting into bar fights or rambling about how we are So Much More Moral and So Much Better than everyone else isn't going to make the EU more competitive.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Yep. But all the informal chats I've had over the years across Europe (from Greece to the Nordics) point to no change whatsoever because even though we have more and more sovereignty concerns there is zero interest from national governments in truly invest in anything but showy stuff that will bring immediate cashbacks -- like 5G licensing, which also taxed telcos and infrastructure providers heavily without any real return (and thus soaked up any mindshare/cash they might have to improve the hosting situation).
pjc50 2y ago
I think that some of this is an inherently Telco problem. The same reason as the US internet isn't dominated by AT&T, and the X25 etc series of protocols lost to the internet ones.

exe34 2y ago

Hertzer in Europe is pretty good, but they don't have first mover advantage and they haven't got as much control of mindshare in governments. A lot of people only discovered their existence once the US went to the dark side.

omnimus 2y ago
Technically many of these server/hosting companies were in the market first. Hetzner is older than AWS. Mailbox is like 10 years older than gmail/google. So the US companies are the ones who didnt have first mover advantage.
- exe34 2y ago
  I meant at hyperscaling. AWS was already doing it with their own servers, so they had both the producer and consumer working in one place to expand out.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Hetzner is not a hyperscaler.