The shadow investment wars of Alibaba and Tencent
lillianli.substack.com
lillianli.substack.com
This has begun to change in recent years as greater investments have occurred, but are in comparison still much smaller than what Asian tech companies are willing to throw down.
I wonder what the more correct strategy is here.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/07/microsoft-apple-and-alphabet...
Tech companies in America succeed in spite of our government. And this honestly baffles me. We should be enacting policy that supports, not hinders, the industry that quite literally is the only reason our country currently isn't in a recession.
And the U.S. is in a depression. There is no plan for the Federal Reserve to recoup all the 6 trillion plus dollars it's invested in the last few months. Our economic demise is coming soon.
Why do you believe this to be true?
Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. don’t employ _that_ many workers. Yes, there are contractors associated with each, and localized impact for service workers (now surely less.)
But I’m not sure that we can say tech is saving our economy right now.
Amazon requires people to buy to increase revenue, meaning they have to have spending power already. So they have to either use savings or have income.
Apple the same. Netflix too.
There needs to be more information that Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. are employing more people than before — i.e. backstopping what would otherwise be a crashing economy.
When you look at their numbers, that’s not the case. They’re not seeing explosive growth during the pandemic, despite expectations to the contrary.
If we look to the stock market as a measure of economic strength — and we shouldn’t — it has been propped up by lowered interest rates.
With bond yields as low as they are, investors have to put their money _somewhere_ and stocks are the seemingly appropriate risk/return for the moment. But that’s not a sign of a good economy. Quite the opposite.
- Honesty in financial disclosure?
- Fairness in employment policies?
- Responsibility in data governance and handling?
Something else?
Everyone has learned from microsoft's antitrust trial you want some semblance of a competitor and not look too self serving.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, etc. are not allowed to buy up the competition freely. That's a big reason they're sitting on so much cash, they can't really spend it on anything in a sane / responsible manner. About the only thing they can safely, legally do with it is toss it back to shareholders.
Intel for example would never have been allowed to buy TSMC while they were a lot smaller than Intel. Intel isn't allowed to buy ARM or AMD. Intel wasn't allowed to buy Nvidia when Nvidia was a lot smaller. Intel has had the dominance and cash for a very long time to eat all competing semiconductor companies globally, and they would never have been allowed to do that (thus they didn't; they would have loved to do so). Intel has been under heavy government observation regarding competition for decades now, they're half crippled.
Microsoft wouldn't have been allowed to acquire Apple circa 1998-2000, even though they trivially could have done so. And dozens of other tech companies are on the: may not be acquired by Microsoft list.
Facebook isn't allowed to buy TikTok or Twitter or Pinterest or Snapchat.
Google wouldn't be allowed to buy Bing from Microsoft. Google wouldn't have been allowed to acquire Yahoo.
Amazon wouldn't be allowed to acquire Netflix or Walmart or Target.
Juniper has been sitting out there forever because Cisco isn't allowed to acquire them, along with several other prominent competing companies. And simultaneously, since Cisco isn't allowed to acquire such companies under our economic system in the first place, they then also benefit from having Juniper out there as a competition prop to point to.