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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

These people were all popularisers and marketers, not original inventors.

There is actually no good theory of social value underlying capitalism. "More money = good, less money = bad" is crude and unsophisticated nonsense.

The reality is that there are many different activies creating "value": original invention in different flavours, packaging and industrialisation, marketisation, promotion, sponsorship, monopolisation, wealth capture and tribute collection, destructive resource extraction, sustainable resource extraction, and so on. Among others.

Only some of these generate real value. Others consume real value. But market theory is too clumsily unsophisticated to highlight the distinctions in a way that maximises productive creation while minimising unproductive capture.

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Page Rank is named after Larry Page (not, as some erroneously believe, after web pages). Google is unique among the companies named in that it did actually grow out of original search engine research.

With respect to Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, you are more correct. For instance, MS-DOS was originally QDOS (Quick 'n' Dirty Operating System) and bought off of another Seattle company by Microsoft.

Page Rank is not rocket science. Sooner or latter someone else would have come to the same conclusion (using incoming links to asses popularity).

I don't doubt that Larry Page is a talented man, but he was in the good place in the good moment. Now Google is in a dominant position and there's no place for any competition, but if Google never existed, we would have some other company doing similar things as Google. Maybe they would have appeared one year later.

>> Page Rank is not rocket science.

Many scientific discoveries seem simple after the fact, like the Einsten's E=mc2, yet somehow it took one of the greatest minds in history of mankind to come up with it.

there is a big difference between scientific discovery in a science-hostile environment back than and todays norm of continuous discoveries though...

Depending on which country you live in, the government might well be described as "science-hostile".

> Sooner or latter someone else would have come to the same conclusion

Indeed, at the same time as Larry Page was thinking about PageRank, Li Yanhong created and patented RankDex (a very similar page ranking algorithm) over in New Jersey - and built Baidu out of it.

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