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Comment by syrrim | Hacker News Reader

>They're essentially circumventing market mechanisms

That's the point. Market mechanisms will only fund things that will obviously succeed in a short time. A market cannot innovate or be creative. A single person, with a proven track record of being ahead of the curve, can.

>and wasting a bunch of resources

The tremendous excess of resources we enjoy today comes from allowing a large number of people to explore ideas without first proving that does ideas were guaranteed successes. Not only can we easily afford to waste resources, we can't afford not to.

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> The tremendous excess of resources we enjoy today comes from allowing a large number of people to explore ideas without first proving that does ideas were guaranteed successes.

Yes, that is why I believe we should distribute resources so that as large as possible a number of people continue to have that opportunity, rather than concentrating so many resources in one man's project.

Is a company with tens of thousands of employees really one man's project?

Yes and no. Obviously other people are involved. But it's driven by one man. One man gets to decide the direction and has ultimate control.

This is clearly a very different situation to for example the case of 2 companies with 5000 employees or 4 companies with 2500 employees, or even 2000 companies with 5 employees. Those cases would all allow for much more variation in approach, and this in turn would allow much greater scope for market feedback from consumers to affect the development of the products offered.

    One man gets to decide the direction and has ultimate control.

This is one of those statements that sounds pithy and is theoretically correct but in practice. The person at the top has far less control than people think they do and it's incredibly difficult to wield what control they do have with any kind of precision or accuracy. What actually happens is the the organization is full of people who attempt to do what they think they are inferring the people above them want and the result is an aggregation of all those little inferences of varying quality and accuracy. The bigger the organization the less control the person at the top actually has.

It's still very difficult for someone working under someone else to work in a direction that there superior is outright opposed to. For example, imagine someone at Facebook wanting to take a pro-privacy stance. They might be able to have some impact, but they're going to be overruled and undermined at every turn, whereas if there were a competitor with a staunchly pro-privacy leader / leadership team then that would be very different.

> Market mechanisms will only fund things that will obviously succeed in a short time.

Glynn research institute.

For that matter celera, which arguably shows that the market will fund things that will obviously NOT work in a short period of time; anyone with half a brain could have told you that they were unlikely to be able to 'patent half the genome' but it's like greed and not understanding the narrative dominated.

This is a really good comment.

I think this sort of research done by large corporations is a big reason for the US's success. Just look at Xerox's PARC[0] where so much was incubated that couldn't have been if Xerox just focused on short term profit seeking.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

It's one thing to run a small research lab - it's an other to bet your entire company future on something that doesn't exist yet.

It's a bold move, a big gamble. Isn't that what sets Silicon Valley apart from traditional companies?

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