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Comment by docflabby | Hacker News Reader

Every world leading company won it's position though unfair advantage. Those are normally breaking laws, fraud, stealing technology or slave labour.

None of them are there on merit.

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TSMC is the world leader in semiconductors. Were they "breaking laws, fraud, stealing technology or slave labour"?

Visa/Mastercard are the world leaders in payment processing. Were they "breaking laws, fraud, stealing technology or slave labour"?

“Unfair advantage” doesn’t have to be exactly one of those 4 items.

Visa has been breaking laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#Litigation_and_regul...

they hired Taiwanese talents from silicon valley that left with IP, no ?

I’m simplifying things greatly here, but TSMC was founded by a man who took his US semiconductor experience to Taiwan and got his initial fab partially bankrolled by the Taiwanese government to get it off the ground. Personally, I’d say that counts as unfair advantage.

his US semiconductor experience to Taiwan

He took knowledge he gained as part of his employment to Taiwan. Was there any allegation of IP theft or are you saying everything you learn when working for an employer stays with the employer..that you can never use that knowledge at your next job. Figured out how to build a CI/CD pipeline for BIGCO1? Can't use that knowledge at BIGCO2..

I did not say that at all and I'm disappointed you would jump straight into a straw man argument. The parent comment and mine are about unfair advantage, not about IP theft. If you take your years of industry insider experience and start a company that directly competes with your previous employer, under the patronage of an entity that other people don't have access to, you have an unfair advantage in comparison to your would-be startup competitors. And that's the whole point of this particular comment thread - many successful companies had some kind of unfair advantage they were able to leverage to gain market position.

Also, as a side note, knowing how to build basic software tools is not even remotely comparable to having the extremely specialized knowledge required to build a microchip fab.

Taiwan was, and is to a lesser degree these days, also highly patronistic in terms of you needing to know people to get that kind of government support. That kind of corruption was why the locals were protesting and organizing against the KMT in 1947 and still echoes today in a wide investment gap between northern and southern Taiwan.

Morris Chang may be a great guy but he was directly recruited by an authoritarian government that was still operating under martial law, and that absolutely was not an option available to most Taiwanese.

You could easily argue they both did and do. Raw materials (see Cobalt mining in DRC as example) for semiconductors are tracible to mines throughout central Africa and South America that use child slave labor. Visa/Mastercard uses computers, which have semiconductors, which use slave labor as seen above, so they too use slave labor. It just depends how far you want to set the scope of the argument but you could easily trace all companies in all developed countries to slave labor arguments similar to the above.

Even being born in a developed country/society is an unfair advantage, especially to well equipped parents or families.

I forgot nepotism :) it's not an exhaustive list

Last one's a joke. Right?

they got whole of resources from government, this is a very special condition. do it happen on most of big companies?

There are many winner-take-all markets where dominance by a single firm makes complete economic sense ('natural monopolies'). In such a scenario it doesn't really matter which firm takes the lead: one of them will end up on top and it doesn't have to be through foul means - the self-reinforcing dynamics of the market are enough.

This is the point that has definitely become super apparent to me in the last decade or so. It's not that companies have to be evil or fraudulent, but usually the companies that "win" end up being the most aggressive, and then there are just a ton of positive feedback loops that make the company with the slight lead even stronger. All people (potential employees, potential execs, VC firms) want to go with the winner, so as soon as one firm starts to pull away from the pack it becomes much easier for the firm to attract the best talent and funding.

And convincing countries to give you monopoly on various things, and to wielding power over countries to make them pressure other countries to do the same.

Which of those got Google to where they are? Apple?

all and all. other things too, but companies naturally want to downplay the impact of those 4 factors

I'm pretty sure there are multiples of movies made about Apple's journey that you may be interested in. As for Google, do you recall from the last 20 years any of the complaints about SEO fairness, AMP drama, Chrome monopoly, etc?

This feels like a bait question because the answers are so obvious.

I don't think any of those obviously match any of the categories that the parent comment mentioned. It's even less clear that any of them were central to the success.

indeed, all of these issues were problems only because they were already dominant

well, you are outing yourself as one who doesn’t recognize reality. now, if you are getting a paycheck from google, fine, feed yourself and your family. otherwise you’re a shill dude. live it, love it, waste the only life you have. your choice good for you. like heroin, but more profitable and not as fun.

All of the controversial stories about Google were long after Google took-over as the best (yes, actual best) search-engine.

Alphabet is an ad company that depends on collecting vast amounts of data. Search alone does not make money.

What do you mean? Search generates more money than the rest of Google together. Through ads, yes, but Google search could run ads even without the rest of Google. Nothing else Google does generates nearly as much ROI as search, just that they can't invest more into search since they already got the entire market there so they do other things like putting countless hours into optimizing those search ads.

google search is so personalized now, you only get best in class search if you log out first.

Chrome monopoly

How is Chrome a monopoly? Google made a good browser and customers chose it over other alternatives. Now you can argue that chrome isn't a god browser. But that's your opinion. People are voting with their feet. Does google have an obligation to make their browser suck?

Did they? Or was it because Google asked everyone who used Google search to install their browser for several years?

google took someone else's browser, put their logo on it and started advertising the shit out of it.

(illegal) data collection (in many jurisdications) that is now impossible to replicate is a major competetive advantage

I think it was declared legal time and time again? I'm familiar with at least a couple image-related lawsuits where they came out on top.

The bigger issue is that website owners have become increasingly hostile to crawling, and that's effectively closed the door behind Google, because that's when it starts getting more legally contentious. Which is why I think they should be forced to open up their crawl to everyone, so that we can have meaningful competition in the indexing/search space.

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