The Tech Monopolies Go Vertical
mule.substack.com
mule.substack.com
- regulated markets (eg limiting service bundling such as free email financed by targeted ads, tying devices to social logins, predatory social network effects, mandating availability of profile data for ad targeting to third parties, stopping ad platform Ponzi schemes eg without objective third-party efficacy measurement, create strong consumer laws against entertainment devices wanting to track and send ads to you, rethink 5G networking)
- mandate standard formats for your data/text providers to export at your request for you to move to another provider
- stop hw/sw bundling and/or tax closed hw/sw platforms different from general-purpose computers (such as has been done with Playstation)
- net neutrality
- return to public sponsorship of development for standards in information processing and demand alignment to such standards in at least public tenders or beyond (such as in the construction industry)
- mandate E-commerce transactions be represented through standard, signed order and billing manifests (rather than allowing proprietary ad-hoc/pseudo currencies which would also be problematic for tax authorities) or create/mandate digital currencies
The challenges we're facing as civilization due to digitalisation aren't entirely new and have been addressed for eg the telco and financial industry. It's only in the last decade that we're being brainwashed to become slaves to "the Cloud".
Until underlying reward mechanisms change political will won't have a chance to build.
Also, in most world states, large corporations are able to threaten leaving - stopping activity in the country - which can be quite a hit to the local economy for smaller states and larger corporations.
Another point which hinders your suggestions is the imbalance between world powers, especially the US (and to some extent the EU and China) - so that if one or several of those are beholden to corporate interests, then the others, or world-wide bodies, will find it very difficult to mandate things, apply taxation etc.
After all, politicians in democracies should be responsible to their electorate, shouldn't they?
[1]: https://www.lepoint.fr/high-tech-internet/exclusif-comment-g...
[2]: https://www.lobbycontrol.de/2020/11/mit-harten-bandagen-wie-...
If a big American corporation is transferring lots of money from Europe to America while engaging in some sketchy behaviour, Europe might be more enthusiastic about clamping down on that than America. For both financial reasons and due to different political priorities.
It's not like Europe could unilaterally reverse Google's purchase of Youtube or Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can say that they should.
I mean, in democratic ideology they should, but democratic state institutions, legal and organizational arrangements are not fashioned to achieve this outcome; and most democratic states were not, after all, created by the mass of people setting up those arrangements. Rather, elite groups and powerful interests set such states up, with democratic elections being a mechanism for legitimizing the new regime among the masses, or a concession to public pressure.
Unlikely. Prior to incorporation, families were the operating unit of commercial and thus military and political activity. This pattern would resurrect itself: families, like corporations, can be immortal. That means they can plan and be trusted for the long term.
Note, too, that incorporation gives rise to charities, unions and independent lobbying groups like the Sierra Club. You lose those when you wipe out legal personhood.
In many ways it's actually way more diverse now than it's ever been, just that some of these players are not making their innovations generally available but rather keeping them inhouse.
I feel the barrier has been high for quite some time, Intel was/is a monster that is occassionally caught napping. Maybe they'll wake up again and pull something big out of the hat, turn into a IAAS company as well maybe.
To be honest all of this seems like a reasonably decent competive market compared to the old days, we seem to have collectively forgotten the decades of wintel.
[1]: https://repair.eu/
"The vote means that the European Commission now has the full support of the Parliament in moving forward with the development of laws [...]"
The big companies have no real problem complying with the regulations, it's quite clear that consumers don't actually give a damn. All you've now succeeded in doing is making sure any startup has a tonne of bureaucratic nonsense to wade through to get it right.
What you need to do is identify where a transaction has not been made between two parties for fair recompense. One potential area is to say that without adequate repair cover you are now forced to dispose of your electronics and pay for the safety disposal so that it does not pollute the environment for everyone else. Then a consumer might see the need for repair rights and make an informed value decision.
Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical.
As an anecdotal example; circa 2011 the australian goverment brought in legislation to make portable A/C units more efficient. Great, right? Wrong, the government in it's infinite ineptitude managed to word so that it only effected dual vent portable A/C units and left single vent A/C units unaffected. Instead of making dual vents more energy efficient the companies pulled all dual vents from the market and now you can only get single vents which are woefully inefficient. This is not the companies faults, they did exactly what you would expect them to do. The government fixed the legislation 11 months ago but unfortunately we can still not get dual vent A/C at all in Australia.
Why do consumers need the government to enforce child labor laws? FDA regulation? OSHA? These lessons are written in blood.
Yes, you might need to work on the regulation in order to get it just right but "who cares, whatever" is not acceptable unless we want to live in an effectively-communist world with a few vertically-integrated corporations setting all the rules.
I personally prefer the latter, but I also don't think that people loving Macbooks or integrated ARM SoCs is going to change whether I can get a Thinkpad where I can upgrade the RAM with a Philips head.
Sure, it might cost a little more further down the line, maybe Intel won't be the behemoth it's been for the last 25 years, but if most people are willing to pay for their black box to get repaired, why does that mean the government needs to step in?
It's been happening in the car market too: even entry-level sedans are becoming black boxes more and more, but people snatch 'em up.
I should also say I'm very much in favor of the "right to repair", but more in the vein of "you can't legally forbid me to repair my John Deere tractor" than in the vein of "Apple shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to any repair shop that demands them".
$vendor shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to anybody
Hmmm... Ok... I think get it now! Regulations are always bad and never good. Wow, it's so simple. Thank you for this valuable and insightful information.
I would argue that a lot of consumers _do_ value it, but they don't know enough to ask about that up front.
Most people want to buy a thing, then use that thing, and when it breaks they reasonably assume that they should be able to get it fixed if they'd like. Cars work this way, appliances work this way, etc.
I think the reason why people don't ask for this up front is that
(1) most people would assume they have the right to repair (and thus don't think to ask) and/or
(2) life is short, and we shouldn't need an advanced degree specializing in a particular category of products in order to know all the ins and outs of buying one :)
I don't think it's that simple at all. There are lots of small reasons people right now act the way they do which in the aggregate makes it look as though they don't value repairability. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer a world where repair was easy and cheap. It also doesn't mean that a world where repairs are easy and cheap isn't preferable to one where it isn't, in a bigger perspective (environmental, for one).
Chip-OS dyads like wintel. Platforms duopolies & oligopolies. Neutrality & commodification vs lock-in dynamics. Public or free standards as an alternative to platforms. etc.
A lot of these dynamics have recognisably repeating in the computing industry (also telecom & media) for 4 decade.
OTOH, scale is a quality unto itself, and as this article suggests... Vertically integrated computing is very much a megacorp endeavour. I think the difference here is the scale of these companies.
I can also see that companies should be required to release schematics of the products and documentation for any file formats etc. they use, so that when you save a project from a given program you should be able to convert it to another format. Companies should also be prohibited from using AI as customer services.
Companies are for the benefit of people.
When companies become a detriment to public health and wellbeing they need to be regulated.
We don’t know the unit cost of those parts, but we know from past statements they are a very small proportion of what Intel is charging OEMs for their processors.
Given that the perception has always been that MacBooks are the best built laptops available, but priced at a substantial premium, it’s been fine for a Dell or HP to coast by on lower prices and thinner margins (as long as Apple wanted 30% or so in profit on each unit sold it was easy to compete on price and still make a living).
With the M1, Apple now has the option of competing directly on price while preserving their margin, with a substantially faster machine, that still has the other premium elements (e.g. the aluminium body, the massive trackpad).
I don’t know how any one of their competitors can compete with a similarly-priced device that is faster, better built, and commands much higher residual value down the road.
Maybe I’m being naive but I’d be very worried right now if I were Dell/Lenovo/HP, especially given that Intel doesn’t have a working 5nm process.
It’s even worse for companies like Hynix, given the performance gains from the on-package memory architecture in the M1. AMD are going to have to go down that route now to compete, and that doesn’t leave much room for direct-to-consumer DRAM vendors (although given the questionable histories in that market it may not be the worst thing for the consumer).
DRAM always been at aroun 10-20ns of latency. PCB traces themselves add a maximum of 6ns roundtrip.
DDR PHYs on both sides do huge amounts of analog, and digital signal conditioning. Refresh system add random latency if you hit a refresh cycle. Prefetch-burst mechanism also adds limits of your effective random access times.
This is why HBM may well beat regular DDR on real world latencies.
First time I hear that.
I’m not saying they will sell third rate quality products like $400 laptops or $200 phones and tablets, but they are interested in lower prices and making up for it by getting people to purchase more from the whole ecosystem.
I can't see anything in the way of Apple creating a lower priced MacBook SE at around, say, $700. With that move, Apple could essentially own the technology stack (iPhone, iPad, Mac, accessories, etc...) of millions of consumers previously priced out of the Apple ecosystem, consequently driving services revenue.
So in a way, even though Apple isn't making money directly off the sale of that old iPhone, they're still able to feed this lower-end market and make money from apps and services, without directly lowering their prices and maintaining their perceived high-end status.
Edit: I gave an iPhone example but it certainly extends to the Mac lineup as well.
How can they be a "premium" brand if they already own a large percentage of the market?
Premium, by definition, is only for a small group of people.
Am I missing something?
That's what makes them one of the largest companies in the world.
Premium profit margins with commodity market share.
Unless you think Apple is loss leading on the M1 devices, which I just can't see them doing.
Apple has had their own chips before and the PC industry is fine. These sort of things are always cyclical. It's easier for Apple to do the M1 when it's a shiny new thing than keep innovating for a decade. Eventually someone will come up with some innovation they can't match and it will swing back towards integrating commodity parts.
It doesn't take a "shiny new thing" every year to keep the M series chips looking better than Intel. Perhaps you're right and in another 10-15 years it'll come back to commodity parts, but it would take something Very Shiny to push that at this point. And afaict Intel is in no position to deliver anything shiny enough to do that.
I don't know what the margin is selling DRAM OEM vs just the part.
The memory business seems like there's always pitfalls and challenges and cycles, but is this change really that significant?
Apple has no interest to be in that market, unlike the CPU market, which is a high margin, high product differentiator business, it really hard to sell your design as outstanding when the guy next door sells a laptop with the same CPU at half the price.
Beyond a certain scale middle men's costs become non-trivial and hard to ignore. In case of Apple, though it is more than costs alone because they want end-to-end control of UX. By the looks of it processor had become a limiting factor in achieving that control.
Makes me wonder, processor is the lower layer in the stack. What about upper layers? Apple have already rolled out their credit card. Maybe their own cellular network? A new WiFi standard, perhaps?
Conversely if brands become popular they open their own retail stores. The point is not not give your profits away to others if your business is the one bringing in the customers and margins, not them.
But it looks like for the average consumer, they wouldn't really care as long as their needs are met, even if those machines are becoming more and more like appliances.
Most people never change anything in their system, and know little more than exactly what they need to do the specific tasks they want to do (writing documents, photo storage, e.t.c) An appliance like system where "it just works" and you never need to understand any of the structure or fiddle with the computer in any way is probably exactly what a lot of people want.
Even the systems that should most "just work" still leak abstractions like sieves.
After tens of millions of people are harmed by this, laws will be passed, or knowledge will be passed down never to do this again.
They were one of the first to do that, and have been doing for more than a decade, while profits only increase.
Then Google, Apple and Amazon.
Windows, on the other hand is worse of both worlds - Nothing works from the start, and it's not easily configurable. (Before you bring your pitch-forks I use Windows on daily basis)
I know it's still a fashionable meme on HN to hate Windows and Microsoft for telemetry and Candy Crush, but saying nothing works is a bit of an exaggeration at this point.
Using both Windows 10 and Linux at home and work I can say that while linux is the de facto OS for the server/cloud/embedded system, Windows 10 is the rock solid go-to for the laptop/gaming station, especially on laptops with nvidia cards where very few linux distros and desktop environments would not shit the bed on, especially with thunderbolt docks, with multiple displays and various scaling. Authentication via fingerprint readers or IR-cameras on Linux? Good luck with that.
Granted, that's not linux's fault that driver support from hardware vendors is absolute dog shit, but as a user/employee/consumer I'm gonna use whatever just-works™ to get my work/entertainment needs fulfilled with minimal friction, and at this point, outside the Apple ecosystem, Windows 10 has the best driver support by hardware vendors by a long shot with linux sadly still relying on reverse engineered drivers by the community or binary blobs which are ignored by the FLOSS community, which turns linux into this dumpster fire on the more "fancy" laptops that use anything more than an intel chip with integrated graphics that are nothing more than ssh terminals.
It's just clicking the snip button in the action center by the clock or pressing "WinKey + Shift + S" then draw the rectangle for the area you want captured. How much simpler is screenshotting on the Mac?
You not liking some of the default apps that come with the OS(which is understandable) does not make an OS bad.
I also hate some of the apps that come with most linux distros but that doesn't make linux terrible.
Windows isn't easily configurable? By what metric? There's a dozen ways to enter the same settings and most of the time you can just search for what it is about the operating system you want to change - in the operating system itself, with the OS's own search bar.
And "nothing works"? What the fuck are you even doing on Windows 10, where you and apparently only you, manage to break all functionality after the initial install?
I can't even remember the last time I've had a problem with Windows 10... a blue screen, hell, even an application crash.
What's the point of having any operating system of you can't install applications on it that work for you.
It's true that the average person doesn't want to spend time tinkering with tech and take the risk of breaking things. But that's not the same thing as being happy with how things work, and it's not the same thing as using tech as productively as possible.
When I write software or talk to people about how they use software, they always want it to work somewhat differently. They do want customisation for entirely sensible and very specific reasons. They just don't want to do it themselves. That's why consulting and support is a huge global industry.
The problem with "just works" is that it only has meaning where the requirements are specified in great detail with very little variability. That's always trivially the case for single purpose household appliances. It's also the case for things like making phone calls or for device drivers. No one wants to "customise" a device driver to stop it from draining the battery.
But computers are not single purpose devices. They are used for a million different things in a million different situations. "Just works" is largely undefined outside of core OS functionality. And that's why the appliance metaphor just doesn't work.
If productivity of end-users was the goal then we wouldn't see random changes to interfaces that people had learnt, for no other reason than some graphic designer thinks it doesn't look "fresh".
The truth is for most of what most people do, computing was solved around 2010-ish and all anyone wants now is for things to be more reliable, faster and cheaper. But that's much harder work for companies that a new flat interface style, or some animated emojis.
Make the number go up. All hail the number.
Tech companies are turning everything that you can put software on into something you rent. And you can put software on everything.
Software companies are becoming the ultimate rent seekers. The endgame of anyone/any company, it seems :-)
This isn't glib doublespeak. There's probably a better way to articulate this for people who were formally educated in business (not me). Basically customer lifetime value is variable on a monthly fee, meaning you can always add upgrades and provide support. But if you just sell it one-and-done then depending on the price it can be difficult to find the motivation to provide any meaningful long-term support.
If I find I actually need any kind of support with any service/product and I can't "just use it" then I start looking for an alternative product/service.
There's something rotten at the core of everything-as-a-service and continuous-improvement and growth-hacking and everything that comes with it... Most people actually like things that are done and stay done, most stuff doesn't need to need to be fixed, and it doesn't need to evolve or improve beyond the glacial pace needed to keep up working on the infrastructure it uses...
as a customer, i don't have the choice to not pay for such upgrades but continue using the old one.
And yet, the SaaS subscription cost is charged continuously whether the customer likes the upgrades or not.
So no, i don't agree with the SaaS business model. It's more extractive. The point of buying a piece of software is the same as buying capital equipment - purchase once, and have it work "forever" (and since software doesn't rot like real equipment, this should be even more true).
What i would pay a subscription for is live/in-person support.
It's the same with hardware. At one company we used to operate a 3-year hardware refresh cycle and this used to make a lot of sense, 3 years was a long time in hardware, and this assumption was true for a long time. But the pace slowed as manufacturers stopped making big improvements and just started eking out marginal gains. We looked at our kit and our workloads and realised that we had plenty of capacity and instead of refreshing proactively we should stretch it out to a 5 year or longer cycle and replace failed equipment with new rather than disposing of things that still worked perfectly well after 3 years. Saved a ton of money doing this, both in buying hardware and in the effort taken to move applications around. Of course manufacturers got wise to this and looked for ways to get you back on that treadmill.
And while you may still have a perfectly valid use case for hardware, I think the growth of IaaS speaks for itself in showing that variable pricing is popular.
I disagree with that to a degree. Sure the bits that make up your software don't "rot", the compute environment under which it operates is always changing and will lead to it no longer working.
Try taking any PC, whether it's Windows 10 running IE or it's Ubuntu running Firefox, and just stop updating it. How many years will you feel comfortable using it? _Eventually_ you're going to need security updates, interface with new protocols, support/function on replacement hardware when it dies, etc.
I'll acknowledge that in reality, there are internet routers, industrial machines, and the like that can probably run for decades on the same software revision given enough babysitting and like-replacement of the hardware. But even the security software around those like firewalls are going to need to be refreshed and upgraded which costs money. In the grand scheme of things, somewhere in the stack, something is constantly being upgraded and refreshed, and SaaS fits perfectly into that model.
Don't forget every medical lab machine ever made.... some of that stuff is still running windows 95
It also seems to work for business customers, who have many tools available to handle logistics of subscription, a more equal position in the relationship, and more ways to deal with cashflow problems.
It's much less beneficial for individuals, though. Some problems:
- Even if the monthly subscription is 10% of its would-be box price, I'm likely going to pay more than I would if I could buy it.
- By subscribing, I gain a new relationship to manage. Managing relationships is cognitively taxing, there's only so many an individual can handle[1]. I don't want that relationship with you, I want to use a software products, no strings attached. Much like when I buy bread, I don't enter into relationships with the bakery, the mall, the flour plant or the wheat farmer[2].
- As a part of being in a relationship with you, I'm bound by your ToC, which limits what I can do with the product. It's not a noticeable problem when dealing with web applications, as limits are often enforced technically - but as more physical, household products become wrapped in services, this is going to become a bigger problem. Right now, the manufacturer doesn't care if I use my dishwasher for steam-cooking[3]; in a service model, this would be disallowed by ToS.
- The modern means of enforcing the core of our relationship - me paying you for access - usually revolve around the software being hosted on your servers. This limits the long-term utility of the product over a version I could keep on my computer, and poke inside if needed.
- If our relationship ends for any reason, I lose the goods. It may be because of me violating the ToS, but it also may be because your company decides to shut down the service, or gets acquired, or goes bust. It's particularly annoying with physical products, which then get taken away or become expensive paperweights. It's a risk I have to keep in mind as part of managing our relationship (and which realistically I won't, and then wake up one day with few days or weeks for figuring out how to replace your service with something else).
- It may seem that incentives of SaaS are better aligned with their customers - I pay, you deliver improvements. But another way of looking at it is, you release an incomplete product, while I pay in hope it'll get improved. Much like "one-and-done" sales have their perverse incentives, so do services (worst case that sometimes happen: making switching costs high on purpose, to ensure I keep paying).
Personally, I'm particularly tired of the relationship angle. I want to exchange stuff for artifacts that give me powers - not bind myself to ever growing number of ephemeral business entities.
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[0] - Not 100% passive because you have to keep the infra running and offer some kind of support, but passive enough that quite a lot of companies seem focused primarily on growing their userbase, not catering for the existing users.
[1] - Rich people and businesses handle this by paying someone to deal with it.
[2] - Actually, I do enter into a relationship with the bakery, but it's entirely handled by consumer protection laws, so the only thing I need to manage about it is knowing what government branch to e-mail with the receipt. And that management cost is shared across all my purchases.
[3] - Worst that can happen is I lose warranty over some more peculiar use cases or tweaks.
For the user however, it means lock-in and their data being held ransom.
A good SaaS manages to remedy the downsides to enable the upsides to shine, i.e. data export, open formats, open core, open source + hosting business, ... and hopefully more diverse and better ideas to cover more markets, use and business cases.
Modern appliances aren't really like this. The control panel will start registering false presses or no longer accept keypresses after a few years (especially if it's a heating appliance and the control panel is not engineered to be in a hot environment), and replacement control panels will be discontinued and unavailable.
I want my Amiga appliance back, computers that have a soul of how hardware and software are designed together.
The IBM PC lineage of putting unrelated components together by yourself is an anomaly in the history of home computers, or computers in general. Selling computers as a whole, with set hardware and software, is what used to be the norm, and it worked well for everyone involved. We are to some extent returning to what things used to be.
Anyway, "general computing" doesn't necessarily mean mixing and mashing hardware. But it definitely means executing arbitrary software with full control over installed hardware. The trend line here is definitely from "more" to "less" of "general computing". We've started with raw metal and hardware diagrams being included in the instruction manuals; then diagrams disappeared, CPUs gained abstraction layers - but it was still fine, computing-wise. But now we're in era of OSes and even CPUs limiting what users can do with them, and multiple parties owning various pieces of a computer, with nothing left to own for the user who actually buys the machine.
Is it though? Apple has innovated a whole lot more with the non-modular Macs and iPads than any generic x86 vendor has managed in years and years.
Modularity means software has to be designed for the lowest common denominator. And that in turn means that there is nothing to gain by innovating in hardware, because the software won't support it anyway.
Somebody who controls every part of both hardware and software can innovate much more freely than you can in a modular market. x86 PCs have been stagnant for decades now.
Sure we have things like Thunderbolt today, but there's a lot to be said for putting the specialized stuff inside the case where it isn't cluttering up the desk and nobody can just unplug it and pocket it.
For a long time, the hardware/data center offerings of Intel, AWS, etc. were close enough to what other companies needed to not make it worth their while to invest in inventing their own solutions to low % compute problems.
However, as:
-- compute loads and costs grew
-- types of compute became more specialized
-- design and build of one's own silicon became more accessible/differentiable
-- companies' needs and tolerances for paying a premium diverged enough from what Intel/AWS was offering,
it then became worthwhile for large companies (who can sustain such hardware development efforts) to design and build their own chips, either for cost reduction or functionality-enhancing reasons. Maybe they just saw the margins being achieved by sit-on-your-hands incumbents and decided, "we could do this too, and better".
Heck even semiconductor companies themselves are worried if they can make it to the 5nm node alone - the XLNX/AMD and especially the IPHI/MRVL merger can be viewed from this light.
What is most interesting is the timing. Software did eat everything, hardware used to keep up. Moore’s law died a quiet death and the solution is everyone makes custom chips for everything. Well then the people who have to most compute are going to make the most chips, but also at a time where the actual entry to do leading edge is the highest. It’s just a very cool time for them to have done it. I’m excited and will be following. Thanks for the feedback, the writing is hard sometimes.
No monopoly loves to talk about how it is a monopoly though, most claim to have fierce competitors. Monopolies usually pretend to be part of much larger markets; where they are just "a small fish in a big pond".
It is not unusual that one competitor becomes so large that it can basically buy up all of its rivals. But it never renames them or shuts them down. They just chug along - looking like competition.
Imagine if the average programmer needs 5 highly specialized laptops to improve their job prospects -- not many will do that even when they have the money.
I mean, until it gets to that point the big companies might not care anymore, sure.
But general-purpose computing is very far from dead or even dying. What we seem to be heading towards is more like a huge divide and a segmentation that might last decades.
Sadly the users don't have much choice nowadays, and I am not saying this to gloat (being a programmer) but more like a lament -- in some areas there are far too few choices (either very expensive or just not that good) and in many others the choice is so big that it might as well not exist because you can't make an informed decision in a reasonable time frame.
This may also mean that the average programmer will be stuck with a concrete platform, because the cost of migration would be too high.
There is a similar situation in a different highly qualified field - airline pilots. If you are a pilot and want to change to another airline, you lose all your seniority and begin at the bottom of the ladder, even if you are an experienced captain with a lot of miles under your belt. [0]
I am okay with it but I can see some tougher times for programmers ahead so I am a little bit torn on if it's a good thing or not.
Plenty of ideas to turn into business when not dealing with free beer.
I am personally semi-okay with a strong specialization and several big areas -- IMO it's about time for that because way too many colleagues bite more than they can chew (me included) on a regular basis.
If these trends pave the way for programmer formal certification I'd support that as well.
That's what most superhero plots are based upon isn't it? The bad guys have gotten so bad that here comes Batman to save the day.
It's fiction for a reason :)
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/majority-of-alexa-now-runni...
One could also see a future where computers become home-built, both software and hardware.
The table showing Google's suppliers left out IBM and their POWER9-based datacenter systems. These include but are not limited to GCP offerings: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-l...
In the same vein, I must admit that I was impressed by the work these monopolies poured into the Open Compute Project. AFAIK, OCP datacenters are rare outside of these companies, but they are one of the net goods that have come out of tech monopoly vertical integration.
I think that we (non-FANG, open-source, university) have to make sure we don't lose the ability to innovate, due to not being able to buy the hardware we need. I.e. if we can't buy an M1 class processor, we can't invent new products that would be enabled by it.
So my prediction is that as chip designs get more exclusive, algorithmic research will become more important again.
Everyone is using interpreted languages because CPU time is still considered cheap. So if you want to prepare for this future as a coder, learn C++ or Rust.
Can we have some regulation against this, please?
I wonder what could be done to reduce that barrier. It sounds as though there is a lot of value that could be unlocked by making it easier (cheaper) to get over it.
I imagine a company that could drop the Verification or Software costs down by an order of magnitude would suddenly find itself with a long lineup of customers. After all, if only 270 companies can currently get over that barrier, reducing the barrier by even $50m or $100m would open up the market to a large number of companies, all with fairly large pockets and a strong incentive to be customers.
And of course, I say this having never worked in the hardware design industry, so all are welcome to explain in excruciating detail how naïve I am.
I think the next frontier will likely be on network bandwidth, in particular user-facing production ones beyond the internal backbones. Currently it's a finite resource that all network providers have to negotiate for and involves more than just the big tech companies. But as workloads continue shifting to the cloud (leveraging the cost efficiencies such as AWS Graviton chips), I'm expecting companies to vying for greater ownership of this external network bandwidth.
I'd be curious of any behind the scenes negotiations being made with Starlink, to leverage its growing satellite constellations to address this.
Datacenters?
Facebook does a lot of custom datacenter stuff, that could be a place
That's utterly wrong. Silicon makers themselves are under intense pressure of dotcoms massive negotiating weights. Chasing the Facebook, Amazon, Google trio is not a pleasant experience as many OEMs found out.
Unlike hardware makers themselves, and OEMs, there is no way any component manufacturer can simply "turn the switch off" on a dotcom client. Such clients can simply wait out few hardware generations, and buy older products just fine.
Now, imagine yourself an OEM, and that a top chipmaker declined to ship him his latest, and greatest chip/part. This becomes instantly less funny. Imagine a graphic card vendor having to ship cards with 3 years old GPUs, or a laptop vendor having to do the same.
Tesla.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Second, for CPUs I don't think that a complete clean-sheet design makes sense for a lot of companies. Yes, I get it, Apple has taken the world by storm - but let's not forget, that Apple gets a lot of mileage from very few designs, probably the same CPU core ends up in the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and now the MacBook - with slight modifications. This is the same, for Samsung, ARM,h Qualcomm, Intel, etc. - most of their CPU designs can be aimed at the market for servers, game consoles, smart devices, PCs, Notebooks, etc. If AWS designs a server core, their entire market is AWS instances probably - not a small one by any means, but smaller than a dedicated CPU manufacturer's, thus the sensible amount of investment they can make into CPU design is lower than that of a dedicated CPU manufacturer. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense for them - it probably does - but it's far too early to predict the demise of CPU companies.
Google will put their custom chip on their Chromebooks for sure, there were couple of Chromebooks already with some weird SoC earlier which was supposedly purpose built for Chromebooks, couldn't remember the name I think it was from Spreadtrum.
The costs are exploding, not only are revenues going to drop because there is no reason to buy anything new, but combined with more "subscription" plans where you don't own your wares and the shorter lifespan of planned obsolecence, you end up in the eye of the perfect storm.
Combine that with global peak energy + debt and covid is just another margin call.
Get out now or suffer the consequenses for the rest of eternity!
Linux on Raspberry 4 and Jetson Nano is the only exit and it will close sooner than you think.
Edit: PCIe NVMe and linux driver/OS bugs on these are the last bottleneck, hopefully solved soon!