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There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the
by nostrademons 3mo ago
There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though:
1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much more as a memory chip company than a microprocessor company.
2. Margins for high-end workstations collapsed in the face of cheaper IBM PC clones and an explosion of MS Windows software. This led directly to the deaths of SGI, Sun, Symbolics, Lucid, LMI, etc.
3. Proprietary UNIX variants like HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and SCO Unix have basically completely died out, replaced by lower-cost proprietary OSes like Windows and MacOS, or by open-source descendants of Linux and BSD.
4. Many commercial database vendors like Oracle, dBase, Sybase, FoxPro, and Microsoft (SQL Server and Access) found themselves very much under margin pressure from PostGres, MySQL, and SQLite. Oracle survived thanks to their massive installed base and legal department, and Microsoft survived because they could cross-subsidize from their OS and Office monopolies, but dBase, Sybase, and FoxPro are no longer with us.
- Obertr 3mo agosecond this. great analysis
- Obertr 3mo agoalso docker is an interesting example. bc its so hard to earn money on it being such a deep commodity you can not close source
- jtolmar 3mo agoThere's a really noticeable difference in time frame covered in your examples (80s and 90s) and the one in the comment you're replying to (2010s and 2020s). Is that just two people with different go-to examples? Or is there something going on here? (I don't mean this as a leading question to some conclusion in my back pocket, I genuinely have no clue.)
- nostrademons 3mo agoSomewhere else in the comments here, someone else remarked "Individuals perhaps [move to the new models], but not organizations." That's illustrative. The mechanism by which organizations are forced to update their technology, move to more competitive suppliers, and cut costs is a recession. In one, every business that doesn't do so goes bankrupt, and what's left are the more efficient businesses that have adopted technology effectively. We haven't had a real recession since 2009. (2020 was an odd case, because it was effectively brought on by government edict and so it actually killed a number of efficient but unlucky sectors while doing nothing to clean out the dead wood in major corporations). The next one is likely to be a doozy, because the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.
- arkh 3mo ago> The next one is likely to be a doozy The US, EU, China are teetering on the edge of a crisis. Russia is well on its way. I feel like 2008 was just a warmup to what may be coming.
- davedx 3mo agoThe EU is not "teetering on the edge of a crisis", why do you say that?
- cezart 3mo agoNot OP but, EU economy is being squeezed by China on the industrial and tech front, and by the US on the innovation/startup front. It is clear EU is no longer at the technological/economic frontier like it used to be 10-20 years ago. At the same time there are serious demographic, budgetary and political challenges all across the continent. Dragi's report covers some of these. It feels like the whole system might fall into a crisis soon if measures are not taken
- abirch 3mo ago
- zmgsabst 3mo agoAlso cases where both happened, eg, Xerox wasn’t wiped out but copiers now have multiple vendors at the high end and have commodity via other brands at the low end.
- Jedd 3mo ago100% agree with the sentiment here, but a small nitpick - MS SQL originated as a port of Sybase onto (IIRC) OS/2.
- cb321 3mo agoThat is a good list. While I'm sure many companies could be added, I only post to include DEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation whose `vt50/vt100/vtXX` ideas may be with us, in software, for perpetuity unless something like Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/) ever takes off.
- mikenew 3mo agoArcan is such a fascinating project that I've never quite managed to get my head around.
- ak1ng 3mo agoSun didn't die because of the workstation market. It survived much longer.
- galangalalgol 3mo agoIt pivoted to server market and people who didn't think running linux was professional enough. Workstations were being held afloat by that pivot. Also they were general purpose instead if limiting their workstation market to just one niche.
- jingpostmedia 3mo ago[flagged]
- cmiles8 3mo agoThere’s a difference between proprietary software thats highly profitable maintaining a stronghold over “cheaper” options and a massively overvalued and artificially inflated ecosystem having to confront economic realities. We are seeing the later start to unravel.
- steelframe 3mo agoI've heard it said that Oracle doesn't have customers. They have hostages.
- margorczynski 3mo agoStill, the clock is ticking. I don't know of any "new" company that would use Oracle instead of e.g. Postgres or would migrate to it. That's probably why they're pretty desperate to jump onto something new before the old source of income fizzles out.
- andriy_koval 3mo agoMy bet is that in some industries like banking, PG share is minuscule.
- Herze 3mo ago[flagged]