Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Horrible article. It makes an arbitrary distinction between products and ideas. I'm sure if you asked Michael Dell, even 10 years ago, what his company is about at its core -- he'd probably say something more like delivering technology to consumers and businesses, customized to fit their individual needs, and using the best processes and efficiencies to deliver at the lowest price possible.

Don't bother wasting your time reading it. You'll have wasted two minutes, learned nothing, and have even less respect for the Economist.

View on HN

The article illustrates the well-known mantra "to survive, you must adapt to your environment".

In the IT industry, incrementally developing your existing businesses will quickly lead to oblivion. IBM succeeded in the transition away from the mainframe business, and thus IBM can be seen as an example what all the companies in the industry need to do to stay afloat.

I did not find this article a waste of time. It reminds me of Thomas Kuhn's view on scientific revolutions. Most of the time people try to solve problems by using already known patterns. Every now and then somebody comes up with a completely new idea; the new idea allows its possessors to solve the problems orders of magnitude better (i.e. faster, cheaper, ...).

Agreed. Was expecting some kind of idea why information technology actually is a mega-trend and what possible game changers are around the corner. Just imagine only one patent on a working quantum computing device and all mentioned companies are out.

I'm not quite sure why e.g. Facebook would care about a working quantum computer, at least in the short run.

On the other hand, why would anybody assume, Facebook could ever have an interest in face recognition? But now they do.

Looks like bashing Facebook leads to down votes, interesting.

But short run is not 100 years. And yes, Facebook will care from day one about QC, think data center and investors willing to burn money to foster old school technology.

As far as I know (and I haven't read too much about QC, so I might very well be totally off), QCs are only useful for a very specific set of problems. And none of those seem to map to FB problems right now.

Will that change? Sure. Will FB do internal research with QCs? Maybe, once they've progressed past the vaporware state. (Sidenote - if we observe QC less, will development work better? ;)

But a working QC will not put FB out of business any time soon. The hardware is only a tiny piece of the puzzle of quantum computing. Algorithms for QC are rare, hard to develop, and the field is in its absolute infancy.

"The hardware is only a tiny piece of the puzzle of quantum computing. Algorithms for QC are rare, hard to develop, and the field is in its absolute infancy."

Is that the description of computer technology as of 1911?

More ca. 1930 - precursors of the Church-Turing thesis showing up. And if anybody then had predicted that "one patent on computers, and IBM is out of business", they would've been wrong too.

"have even less respect for the Economist." <-- is that even possible?

What is your problem with the Economist?

I'm a fan of The Economist, but their big flaw is similar to Consumer Reports' problem: when they focus on their core competency (Economist: geopolitics and finance; CR: rating home appliances) they're the gold standard. But when they venture outside, such as this case of trying to give a quick overview of what makes a technology company successful over the long term, it's obvious that they're out of their depth. Similarly, when CR rates something like bicycles or even high tech gadgets, it can be a little embarrassing, because a lot of time they focus on the wrong attributes out of unfamiliarity.

On the other hand, I think we could put together a pretty august panel of experts on the topic of tech company success out of HR readers, and end up with no suitable conclusion, and ultimately do no better than this Economist article.

I'll have to agree with you there, the part about trashing MS is a little bit silly, Apple is at the top of it's game right now and MS is near the depths of it's game, yet the market cap of the companies are similar and MS just spent the last 10 years being harangued by the DOJ.

It's going to take a couple years to get out of that mindset and into the mobile mindset. It's a little bit silly to think that a company with a market cap of 199 B on a PE of 9 which is highly profitable cannot compete with a company worth 300 B on a PE of 15.

It's way too early to be calling the death of Microsoft, Windows might not be cool, but look around any office of an SMB. The idea that these companies are going to switch to Macs (or iPads) and retrain their entire staff is a little ludicrous.

Their reporting on geopolitics and finance can be very sketchy at times, too - support for the Iraq war and George Bush, for instance.

Or, in the developing world, their near religious insistence that trade liberalization will solve damn near everything.

support for the Iraq war and George Bush, for instance

In what way was it sketchy? Was it just because you happen to disagree? I didn't agree with their endorsement of George Bush either, but I still think their argument for their stance was solid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com