Hacker News Reader

That's what disruption is, isn't it? The ordinary meaning of the word is pretty negative - disrupting something means taking a process that's doing fine, and making it no longer work, or work worse than it was. It implies value and utility being lost.

(Or, the other meaning of the word relates to disruptors - energy weapons from Star Trek, used predominantly by the bad guys in the series.)

Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Meanwhile, the whole business world - it's no longer just the startup culture - is regurgitating the lie that all market disruption is unquestionably good. That we should want more, bigger disruption. We believe that, and close our eyes to companies that make whole markets worse.

Some negative consequences are unavoidable. Maybe Loon made telco execs less willing to build networks in rural areas - but I wouldn't want R&D to stop just because the very notion of an improvement to the status quo makes some incumbents nervous. But on the other end, you have "share economies" companies that use VC subsidies to outcompete incumbents on local markets - but then subsidies run out, and/or companies get bought, and we're being left in a worse place than before the "disruption" happened.

Some good observations there.

The other disruption in the telcom markets in the west has been the action of government - the 3G auctions sucked cash away from the infrastructure developers and providers, numerous interventions in the market promoted as creating competition have in fact resulted in whiteboxers coming in and cherry picking markets and subscribers. Both of these things killed R&D in vendors and infrastructure providers, meaning that Chinese tech is years ahead and the infrastructure providers have virtually no idea about what they are buying.

» the 3G auctions sucked cash away from the infrastructure developers and providers

I don't know anything about wireless spectrum and I have no solid plans to replace what we have but I really dislike the model of spectrum auctions. Does the technology really not exist so that telecoms don't pay (just checked Google) USD 81B and in return we the people can hold them more accountable and allow new players easier access?

I mean anyone can buy a WiFi router but there are still rules about what you can do with WiFi. Why can't we do the same with 5G? At least the real 5G if we can't figure out long range T Mobile sorta kinda 5G?

Wifi is a range of 300 ft and even that has turned super chaotic. In my medium density neighborhood two dozen WiFi networks are listed as nearby.

As transmitting distances get longer I would imagine the chaos would rise exponentially.

in my mind, if we don't make this a transaction involving money, we will be able to add technical restrictions later on for all providers as we need to do so.

As I said earlier, I don't quite understand these things but my understanding is millimeter wave 5G (or "real" 5G) has such a short range that it is practically Wi-Fi anyway.

It doesn't make sense to me to have multiple competing towers with 5G in the same neighborhood. It just sounds a public good to me.

Wouldn't you (the state, I mean) just need to offer different, more restrictive terms when putting spectrum up for auction, if we want more accountability and easier access to New players?

In my mind the problem is once money exchanges hands, it becomes difficult to add more restrictions after the fact.

We don't need their money anyway. All Cingular and Verizon do is borrow public money. We (I mean the state) can easily borrow the money directly.

Frequency block auctions have no negative impact for customers.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20160613172732/http://blogs.z24....

(Apologies for the Dutch source, Google Translate doesn't seem able to translate the entire page so you'll manually have to do it).

No. It does. It takes a public resource (spectrum) and privatizes it, and when coupled with light or no regulation leads to negative social and economic outcomes as the result of the usual race to the bottom of service levels with its attendant upward spiraling of rents to the consumer.

It is probably worth drawing a distinction between profitable and unprofitable disruption too. Unprofitable disruption breaks up the market for a bit, then will eventually go away when people lose the will to keep sending their money down the hole. Then the market has to rebuild the old systems or something.

A profitable business is more likely to be a positive disruption. At least it is sustainable in theory.

> That's what disruption is, isn't it?

Not really in the sense that Christiansen introduced the word to business.

The op was making an important point. Google makes a stab at something, often with a lot of publicity attached, then abandons it. (I mean this in a normative, not critical sense). Because Google is a high profile corporation and, until recently at least, was regarded as having technical superpowers, various other actors reacted to the announcement and the intermittent stream of updates.

That combination (Google’s often impuissance combined with a set of experienced rentiers well versed in lobbying) had a malign outcome that was the precise opposite of competition.

It’s a common trope that yiu can’t trust Google to deliver but this is a good example of a consequence most people don’t recognise.

For those of you who don't know, like I just learned:

> Definition of impuissance: WEAKNESS, POWERLESSNESS

It seems to not be common as an English term. Hilariously, Google's little mini blurb pulls up erectile dysfunction when you look it up.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impuissance

> Christiansen introduced the word to business

I'm more of a fan of Peter Drucker. Smash products are lifestyle choices. Target luxury, high end for initial customer; then ride the cost curve down.

Historian Jill Lepore recently got me to revisit my discomfort with pop biz "disruption". I've always been troubled that Innovator's Dilemma had no predictive power.

My current hunch is that descriptions of "disruption" are more easily explained (analyzed) thru Wright's Law and comparing org's cost of capital.

Which still only covers 2/3rds of the domain. It omits forecasting technological progress. For example, Tesla's original founders saw that in X years time, given the trends, laptop grade Li-ion batteries would be capable (suitable) for electric vehicles. Which help time their entry into the market.

I'm sure that strategy of catching waves has a name. I just don't know it yet.

> and we're being left in a worse place than before the "disruption" happened.

Do you have examples of this? It sounds theoretically right to me but I can't think of any empirical cases of being worse off as a consumer.

'TAForObvReasons mentioned Uber - I think it is an example, though they're surprisingly resilient. I believed (and frankly, hoped) they'll run out of money and then crash and burn for years now, but they still seem to be going strong.

A stronger example that I had in mind are the various food delivery middlemen startups that popped up in recent years. GrubHub, Deliveroo, and many other similar companies. There have been countless discussions outlining their shenanigans in detail, but they ultimately boil down to exploiting the restaurants, already an extremely risky class of businesses, and hastening their demise. These startups care about building up their valuation and eventually getting sold - they don't give a damn about leaving a broken food delivery market behind.

This is the common thread I see, a socially destructive form of disruption: VC-backed startups entering established markets (particularly highly geographically localized ones, like taxis or restaurants), using their infinite funds to offer services below the market price, destroying their competition, and then eventually disappearing, leaving a broken market behind. I see these startups as legal pump-and-dump scams: they don't give a damn about the services they offer, their employees, or customers; their goal is to do anything to pump up the valuation, let the investors make their money back, and then they die, or get dumped onto the stock market, with the public being the patsy left holding the bag.

> I see these startups as legal pump-and-dump scams: they don't give a damn about the services they offer, their employees, or customers; their goal is to do anything to pump up the valuation, let the investors make their money back, and then they die, or get dumped onto the stock market, with the public being the patsy left holding the bag.

Yeah I largely see them the same way, but I can't think of a good way to penalize this behavior without adversely affecting something else. Startup pump and dumps are pretty terrible.

> TAForObvReasons mentioned Uber - I think it is an example

Are we in fact worse off than when taxis were around? I know rideshare contributes to traffic, but the consumer experience is infinitely better than taxis (and still way cheaper, IME)

Well, the news business has unquestionably been disrupted. There are a variety of reasons why that has had a lot of associated negative effects.

The lessons of Google fiber are roughly

a) a bunch of money is not sufficient to build out a residential network; you need a workable plan to get on poles

b) the incumbent telephone companies are capable of rolling out fiber quickly when they choose to

c) if you have underground utilities, you're probably never getting upgrades

d) shallow trenching only works for very specific climates.

If Google had partnered/acquired to get better pole access, and hadn't spent so much effort trying to line up 15 (or whatever) cities simultaneously, they might have built a lasting business. I'm kind of bitter about their ditching of OpenAccess / unbundled local loops, but it doesn't matter much since they barely deployed anywhere. That said, their business objective was really to increase user bandwidth, and that happened, even if it was mostly done by the incumbent carriers.

I really can’t understand this reasoning. Google is part of the reason broadband is bad in the US, because they tried to fix it by competing with the telecoms? This like saying, a person has a gun pointed at your head, it’s really your fault if they shoot you when you try to get away.

The shallow trenching of Google Fiber was meant to counteract telcos strong arming them out of pole attachment.

If the regulatory problem was solved then the difficulties of shallow burial are no longer be a significant impediment.

Yup - but their PR was that it is better, cheaper and quicker than poles; which is total bollocks in urban builds. In rural settings I think that poles are bad due to those nasty tree things that fall through the cables, but mostly ducting is a better solution anyway.

I asked my local company if they were bringing fiber in on existing poles or trenching, and they said they had to trench because fiber isnt flexible enough to go up on poles.

Maybe it is specific to the ones we have- last year a bad storm with 60mph winds caused power lines to clack together and knock out power for several hours.

uh, my fiber is literally just a cable coming down from the pole next to my house. fiber runs on poles all over, like oregon. https://www.michaelsinsight.com/2010/09/hunters-shooting-des...

If you count how hard it is to get onto the poles in the US then its not bollocks.

The difficulties they had around pole attachment meant that shallow trenching was a last ditch (no pun intended) effort. If you attach to a pole in many jurisdictions you are at the mercy of foot-dragging by everyone else on the pole to make way. Google tried to change the rules but ran into significant and expensive opposition from those who were well entrenched (again, pun not intended.)

"The price for doing an urban installation was padded; it was padded - padded with the money that stopped the fibres coming out of the pavement and getting ripped up." If you think this is true, then you haven't been to almost any EU country* -- urban connections are usually better always much cheaper than in the US.

* Well, I can speak to ~8 of them, I didn't check the rest.

which ones? I don't remember DE being all that great, but that may have been a Berlin thing.

Despite the Universal Service Fund paying for decades, some $8 billion a year to telcos (plus more coming from Pai's FCC work) yet rural broadband is still far from universal. Those CFO's had a huge head start and a golden subsidy still arriving daily. They still aren't touching rural.

Not defending the behavior of the local telephone companies, but 8 billion dollars isn’t anywhere near the scale of investment that rural broadband would require in the USA.

8 billion dollars a year, for many years

It's going to be interesting to see what happens with Starlink.

0 plans to upgrade hardware in a modular fashion. Environmentalism?

My guess is that Starlink is what made Loon throw in the towel. Who needs an emergency network made of balloons when there will be a 24/7 network spanning the globe made of satellites?

By that logic, nobody should ever attempt to ever disrupt anything- the existing interests could use it as an excuse to do bad things.