Under the current regime, what is SoftBank to do? Buy four stocks and call it a day? Or pretend to find unicorns that aren’t even tech companies?
This is that small group of similar people, and you may be that person.
We exist. Change is real. Do something.
We are a small startup and we were outpacing 2 of the 4 giants
They resorted to outright illegal stuff
manipulation of search engine results not delivering our emails when it was to their email service hacking attacks click fraud on our ads
*
The REAL problem is not that they have monopoly status and cannot be outpaced
The real problem is that they abuse their monopoly position, do illegal things, and get away with it
Now we are building
both a platform
and
our own search engine
Consider the absurdity of that
Instead of just building a better product (which we had) and being able to win and/or compete based on that
We have to literally build our own entire ecosystem
How many startups can do that?
Should every tech company that happens to be competing against the big 4 monopolies be expected to do that
For example, startups are doing a lot in robotics and synthetic biology.
Remember the old saw "You only use 10% of your brain."? Yeah, that's wrong, but what is almost completely true is "You only use 1% of your transistors."
We have a zillion free transistors and they spend all their time idle--even on tiny, battery powered electronics. We haven't even scratched the surface of what to do with all these transistors.
I have two entire Linux machines that communicate in such a way merely to open a door. And I only feel slightly guilty about being that wasteful. :)
Everybody programs embedded hardware with dongles with underpowered microcontrollers. Why? Put an entire Linux computer behind it (RPi or Beaglebone)--now what can you do?
The current failure of tech is lack of imagination. Or, perhaps more charitably, lack of competent implementors (hardware and software) with imagination.
Transistors are free--now let's build something out of them.