Hacker News Reader

Comment by noetic_techy | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Having trillion dollar valuation companies dominate the internet is akin to letting Standard Oil dominate a resource, or monopolies dominate the emergence of railroads. You have to recognize these technological emergence's when they occur, because typically they will be unlike anything we've seen before. I would argue Social Media is one of those emergence's. Smartphones arguably another.

Ideally, I would like to see tech giants split into 3 companies, with 2/3 residing outside of SV so as not to be subject to the group-think of that region. This coming from someone who grew up in the heart of SV, got into tech, and eventually left.

View on HN

I think we generally should discourage growth of any company beyond a certain size. I don't see any societal value in these large companies but a lot of disadvantages.

Would a bunch of small companies have invented the smartphone? I feel like you often need to have concentrations of a lot of capital at once for big things to happen.

A bunch of small companies invented the smartphone. Who do you think invented it?

I’d say a bunch of companies tried to invent the smartphone...but Apple actually did

That's nonsense. Apple looked at what everybody else was doing and packaged it very well.

Apples stock price is over 16x higher today than it was when the iphone was released. By todays metrics, I might call 2007 apple a small company.

Apple was not nearly the giant it is now when it invented the smartphone. What revolutionary ground-breaking products has that company produced now that it has become a giant?

Exactly. they are kind of coasting on previous innovations made a long time ago. Same for Google: Since search, Gmail, Android and Maps I don't see much innovation coming from there either.

Waymo? Duplex? Photos? Even Chrome is newer than the things you listed.

Waymo got bought, I don't know Duplex, Photos is not exactly innovative, Chrome is just another browser, they existed before

Waymo wasn't bought

It was, actually, from the guy who then tried to sell the tech to Uber and created this massive lawsuit:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...

Even Android was bought, when you think about it.

> Chrome is just another browser, they existed before

That's a weak argument. Email existed before Gmail, web search existed before Google Search, maps even online ones, existed before Google Maps, mobile OSes existed before Android.

> Photos is not exactly innovative

That's what I used to think - another photo sharing/storage thingie. But it has all sorts of crazy machine-learning powered features.[1]

1. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0324/How-Google-Ph...

Or just a couple of smart, dedicated people in a garage

Big companies add huge value to all our wellbeing. 1000 companies with a revenue of ten million dollars can afford to spend little to nothing on research, while one company with a revenue of ten billion dollars can spend a lot. How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Furthermore, you are implying that all that people do has to be done with the societal value in mind. What about the value for individuals? Look at yourself for example. Do you do everything you do for the societal value or to pursue your own separate interests?

Companies benefit from protections given to them by society. E.g. limited liability, copyright, patents and lots of others. So I think it's prudent to ask ourselves as a society from time to time if these privileges are still useful or maybe should be modified or revoked.

I agree that for a lot of research you need to be of a certain size but I don't think you need to be a multi-hundred-billion dollar company. Apple was pretty innovative in the 2000s when they were much smaller. From casual observation it looks to me that they are doing less innovation now than they did back then.

Well, you don't think the society benefits from the companies? Where else would you get all the stuff we use for everything? Where do you get the factories? Where do you get the machines? Where do you get the software?

If you don't think companies bring societal value, ask yourself what the alternatives are. There were a bunch of attempts in the 20th century, however it never ended good for the population.

I said "companies of a certain size". Don't make this into a socialism vs capitalism issue. Yes, companies benefit society. But I believe trillion dollar companies are a negative for society. They get way too powerful.

Only if they use their power to more bad things than good things.

Same with governments and the attempts at state capitalism you're referring to. Everything always is good unless it's bad, the question is how easily can it be constrained when it goes bad (and monitored for the signs of it going bad).

Which they do all the time with no consequence.

By the same line of thinking dictatorships are also only bad if they use their power for more bad things than good things.

Yeah, so?

Society overall gets varying amounts of utility from companies. Mostly they exist to help their owners harness the wealth creating power of workers. By some methods of accounting, many of them are a drain on society; they centralize wealth and create much bigger external costs (resource depletion, pollution) than they create value (engineered obsolescence, disposable crap, useless products & services or ones that serve artificially created demand)

Car dealers, patent trolls, for-profit health insurers, security-theatrics firms, content-distribution conglomerates (ISPs in the US) all are exploiting regulation or lack thereof to profit at societies expense. A lot of finance industry behavior is about unproductively extracting money from other participants. (for example 401k holders)

It's my opinion we should aggressively curb all counterproductive business models, but they tend to be good at protecting themselves. They either win over the masses through PR and deceit, or use more direct corruption of regulators.

> Big companies add huge value to all our wellbeing. 1000 companies with a revenue of ten million dollars can afford to spend little to nothing on research, while one company with a revenue of ten billion dollars can spend a lot.

There's a lot of space between companies with 10 million dollars in revenue and ones with 10-100 billion where lots of R&D can happen.

Smaller companies can be very good at new product development, and are probably better at supporting those products once they catch on and become established. The really far-out R&D is probably better handled by university research labs than by big-company monopolies and semi-monopolies, which then will spin off small product development companies.

> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Seems like quite a lot, actually:

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180509/BLOGS11/180...

http://fortune.com/2016/05/13/big-pharma-biotech-startups/:

> A crucial part of the allure: Pint-size ventures are driving pharma innovation. The majority of drugs approved in recent years originated at smaller outfits—64% of them last year, according to HBM Partners, a health care investing firm.

> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Is that a serious question? The answer is plenty, you just don't hear about them because they're bought up once the FDA approves their medicine.

Those $10M companies don't do research because they are research. The founders have an idea, they try it out, if it works they get acquired by a big company that doesn't do nearly as much of its own research as it used to because this is easier. Sometimes the big companies deliberately let groups of employees leave to try something, with IP and funding and legal indemnification, then buy them back if it works. So plenty of research actually occurs, and it's the big companies that don't need to be part of funding it.

Sure, but if these big companies with lots of money to spend did not exist, there would be no one to buy the smaller ones.

Would that be so bad? If the small companies funded by other means (let's call that "venture capital") could grow into medium-sized fish themselves instead of being gobbled up by the big fish, that might actually be a healthier ecosystem.

> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Lots, and lots try and fail (the ones that succeed, or even make it past the first few big hurdles, often get acquired by the big players, because buying work that's done is less risky than early research...)

There is only one medicine in the past 100 years that cured a chronic illness besides penicillin and its derivatives. That medicine was developed by a small biotech company named Pharmasset and bought by Gilead.

So to answer your question, one might say that 100% of medicines that are not addictive pills to treat symptoms were developed by startups.

To be fair, a lot of the addictive pills to treat symptoms were also developed by startups.

What's wrong with smartphones?

I think the problem is not with smart phones, but with the ecosystem around them. Eg, Apple, and iTunes. Android, and google docs

I think a good example is cars. Imagine having a Ford car that you could only get repaired at Ford dealerships, that only took Ford bumper stickers or other accessories, and only could get filled up with Ford gas at Ford gas stations. I think most people would agree that would be a problem, and we are getting dangerously close to that with smart phones.

We're going in that direction with cars as well (EVs specifically).

What do you think of Tesla as a business and car company?

I'm not super keen on it, though I like Electric cars. I think that they will, or at least should, transition to being more open as electric cars become more common and in a larger variety.

You only have 2 choices for mobile OS, dominated by Apple and Google.

I'm willing to admit now that I actually liked Windows Phone and wish it had become a viable platform.

Same here. I was disappointed when they scrapped it.

I'm on my Lumia 920 right now, due to my Nexus 5x finally biting the dust. I still love the OS. Most of the apps no longer work, my signal is crap, etc. But I still like the OS.

Silicon Valley is responsible for most of the world's innovation, so as a consumer I'd rather we not dictate where firms wanted to set up shop.

Silicon Valley was essentially funded by the US state, and particularly the military. GPS, ARPANET, computers, microwaves, networking, radio transmissions, all of this has been invented for the military, financed and pushed ahead by them. SV isn't a libertarian paradise.

Read the series https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Which doesn't change my statement in the least. In the internet era, Silicon Valley has been the crown jewel.

Facebook is responsible for most of the world's social networking, so as a consumer, I'd rather not dictate how it wants to run its shop.

> as a consumer, I'd rather not dictate how it wants to run its shop.

Think about that statement. Think about it carefully.

You're a consumer. You and people like you are the entire means by which this company earns its money. You really have no interest in how it does so? Even when it has massively significant (statistically speaking--if not you then hundreds of millions of people like you) influence on your life?

Silicon Valley is not responsible for most of the world's innovation. Not even within tech. If the internet started any one place it was at BBN around Boston. The web started at CERN. Microprocessors started at Bell Labs and Texas Instruments. Cellular phones started at Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia. Amazon's up in Seattle, next door to Microsoft, and even Facebook is an import. SV isn't even a player in biotech, clean tech, materials science, etc. The cult of Silicon Valley is getting ridiculous.

You're not going back far enough though — personal computers, the transistor, microprocessor....

Um, I did mention Bell Labs (transistors) and TI (microprocessors). PC is a good addition, though.

Liquid Crystal Displays at the university of a former fishing town in the north of the UK (my home town) [1].

[1] George William Gray - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_William_Gray

Reply on news.ycombinator.com