Is the big tech era ending?
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I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of network effects. You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it.
In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope that everything will just magically get better now that your local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf software seems slightly optimistic.
But I hope I'm wrong.
Only because Microsoft probably assigned two interns to maintain Skype in the last 5 (if not more) years. I do agree with your point though.
People should ideally stop using whatsapp and move over to Telegram as it seems to be the only one that has whatsapp UX parity. Thats what I did, and I also have signal, discord etc and I own no shares of Telegram.
UX parity?? Telegram's UX blows WhatsApp out of the water. Stickers, message edits, polls, location sharing, bots for public channels, audio chats, etc etc. It's not even close!
I think though that while Facebook the social network may not last very long, I'm less sure that Facebook as a facilitator of ads will go away. They have a lot of historical data on which to continue determining ad placement on the Internet. Google ads don't just exist on Google sites.
A) probably never have picked up steam, and
B) had a much steeper uphill battle
Before the plague hit only startups really used Zoom. The corporate video call space was dominated by things like Webex (awful), BlueJeans (awful), whatever MS morphed into current Teams (only slightly less awful), or if you were lucky, Google Hangouts (also just slightly less awful). Skype wasn't even a contender, and even against the kind of all-star field I just listed, it was a shitty experience - which says a lot.
There was a big void for real-time video business conferencing that "just worked", but until early 2020, the space was cornered off by giants who saw it, at best, as barren ground. Enter global, mandatory remote working and all of a sudden the existing players had nothing to offer. The market had stagnated, and beancounters had driven out all expensive innovation. All of a sudden, the space blows up and the neglected main tech in use is no longer fit for the new purpose.
Zoom has a lot of problems, but what they did have was a product that "just worked" in almost any setup, coupled with architecture and infrastructure that at least COULD respond to insane, long-lasting spike in demand.
Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to make space for someone less atrocious. Zoom just happened to catch the tailwind, mostly because all the existing players had also abandoned the space but would not dare to leave it unguarded.
I've used Zoom for online classes (as a student) and don't see any difference or advantage between it and Meets. You still click a link and and a window open ups, your camera turns on, there is a chat box, etc.
Meets craps its UI dimensions when you open chat. Zoom pops the chat window up in the middle of the screen, which is only slightly less bad. Both have problems if you have detachable video camera(s) in addition to laptop's own. And don't get me started on the audio path: even if you do manage to pick the right input and output, there's no guarantee the audio actually gets routed through. Expect to restart the video call software 25% of the time and pray it reconnects the streams all the way through.
Oh, and Zoom's screen sharing experience on multi-monitor OSX setup is unforgivable. When you choose to share a screen, it triggers a sequence where the audience sees your shared view but you do not. The window you chose to share gets hidden locally.
Whoever thought that would be an acceptable user experience needs to have their head examined. Possibly with a trepanner.
This means I can circle a word or append a box to a diagram on a pdf my colleague is screensharing with me.
I can have non-technical meetings on whatever.
But annotation over shared screens is 100% the feature that keeps me on Zoom for all tech work
This upsets me greatly. I recall downloading the old versions of Skype a few years ago from http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ and they were actually nice to use, felt responsive and just generally were most of what i'm looking for in a chat application.
At work, we still use the current versions of regular Skype (not Skype for business, which i'm told is a separate product and disgusting) for stand up calls and some meetings, as well as a chat solution for talking with colleagues, since Slack and Teams chats are too fragmented. It would have been nice to centralize everything on a single self-hosted platform, about which i wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat... but until something like that would happen, Skype is the closest thing we've got (apart from e-mail, ugh).
I also used Skype throughout my university days to chat with my friends, and even all the way back in school, to keep in touch with people. Now, Skype has largely been displaced by Discord or WhatsApp for those purposes (no one seems to care for Telegram or Signal) and there are very few cases when anyone will turn to using Skype anymore.
And somehow, the product is way worse today than it used to be. The UI feels more "app-like" at the expense of being confusing and slow, there are occasionally bugs with how text shows up, it's spiraled downwards far from where the original native apps were and it seems that Microsoft will continuously throw the whole platform under the bus in favor of Teams.
But neither Teams, nor Zoom are good either! The sharing UI just jumps all over the place and in zoom even forces full screen. Zoom is obnoxious and doesn't let you open the options menu without being signed in, whereas Teams is broken and doesn't let you share files directly (neither does Zoom, to be honest). They just feel like a huge step backwards for general purpose communication, instead being meant just for meetings.
So what's left? Discord, Slack and even Rocket.Chat (which i mentioned in that blog post) all have their idiosyncrasies, for example, you can't really use Discord if all you need is one group or meeting, since it's centered around the concept of servers. I really don't know how we went from something that's good enough to a plethora of mediocre and sub par solutions...
The thing that is amusing is that US/Europe seem to think they will be able to deal with this and effectively regulate them, despite not succeeding at this at all in the past (see China + IP, etc).
One major reason is that China is willing to play "unfairly" to support its companies. US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much. They will attempt what they do now, which is to regulate them in various ways to "ensure competition"
But when you go to do that to a chinese company, the government will find a way to make it hurt for you. You make it hurt for Chinese Search Engine Company, they will ban the chip companies from making chips for you, etc. They are much better at this game than the other governments.
This is going to be unlikely, when the Chinese government is actively kneecapping its own big techs.
Data is going to be regulated like money, and not everyone is going to have the privilege to operate data on one's soil moving forward. No western companies could do in China, or vice versa.
> US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much.
They can just ask it to sell, which was happening to TikTok, or setting up joint venture capital. They are many ways to do such things, government can make you bleed if they want to.
Not really, just taming them. Which is pretty much all done at this point.
Remember that in China, the government is the kingmaker. In the US/EU, the companies are the kingmakers. China is simply reminding some of it's companies that this is the case.
As for the last, good luck. You have a coherent long term strategy that they are willing to sacrifice short term for on one side, and a completely incoherent mess that changes every 4-6 years on the US/EU side.
After they are finished kneecapping the US/EU companies, they will need these chinese companies more than china needs them. Not exactly a great negotiating position - there will come a point where you say "sell", and they say "nah, that's okay, we're good".
It's not clear to me that products like Facebook that are primarily driven by cultural rather than technical dominance are something that the Chinese are likely to be able to dominate in. Facebook dominates because your friends and family and hobbies and whatever are on there, doing their thing. When they stop doing that, Facebook won't dominate anymore.
Now if Han culture becomes internationally dominant as the "cool" culture which North Americans Europeans aspire to emulate (like how American culture was internationally in the post WWII era through, say, the early 90s), then all bets are off -- but I think the trend is actually going opposite to that now.
Until then, there will be social networks that dominate in China and there will be social networks that dominate in Europe and North America; because culturally (and politically, obviously) and they will rarely overlap as these are still two very distinct entities.
I think it's likely that the same argument applies to a lesser degree to the ads space, and maybe even to commerce. Something like AliExpress feels worlds apart from Amazon despite the latter become increasingly a wild west of knock-off discount Chinese products anyways.
Those were all facebook's competitors and offered mostly the same features. Facebook succeeded because everyone's friends were there. Facebook was not "integrated", it didnt even have a newsfeed when it started
Things that were different:
- stronger crossover into real life (it wasnt a net persona, LinkedIn was real but it was for jobs, you dont live in it)
- sharing personal Prefs
- games with other members
Maybe I missed these on other websites.
PS: I'm not pro FB, but to my best memory it was clearly different from other websites. Hence my original message.
Come on, can't anyone make a product that connects friends better than FB? I'm sure it's technically amazing, but from a product perspective, my god, look at the thing, it's an absolute garbage fire. You can tell from the notifications it sends that it wants you to watch shitty videos and read shitty news articles alone, not connect you with your friends.
Make a social network that feels like an actual social space and not an ad-infested media shithole, and I'll sign up, my friends will sign up, everyone will sign up, and FB will be toast in a couple months.
My response to that tired theme: you don't need a mega $B valuation to pay for a simple social network for sharing baby pics with friends and family. A non-profit or a benefit corp structure would be just fine.
And people pay $10/mo for Netflix, why wouldn't they pay a few bucks a month for an actually good social network? Heck, make it free for a month or six, no credit card needed, and when people see how good it is they won't leave. I pay for Disney+ just to let my kids watch Disney movies BECAUSE THEY'RE GOOD.
People won't subscribe to a non-free Facebook competitor because Facebook is free and none of their friends are on the non-free competitor... And most of their friends never will be.
Most likely the product will be free for a while and switch to paid. It kind of sucks but for a really good product it could work.
This is almost Reddit's model (with Reddit Gold, and now the various other comment/post awards added recently), except Reddit also sells ads; it'd be interesting to see if the awards alone are enough to keep the lights on absent a need to appease investors.
Much easier said than done. FB is a massive product, I don't think anyone can realistically predict how something that really had all the features of FB would actually fare. Beyond that, we know that new networks are created all the time despite the existence of other big ones. Based on your premise, tiktok shouldn't have existed, nor insta, nor snapchat. Network effects matter but if the product actually does something useful or better and is well designed, people will come.
And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them doing that.
But yeah big tech needs to be massive before it comes under any real antitrust scrutiny.
Question is if road further is a small shift in how services get constructed or complete rewrite in new ecosystem. People betting on web3 are doing wild bets. At the same time people betting on federated are doing very conservative bet on mental shift that is wild(since getting traction on federated is difficult - 98% of people have no real benefit).
They're incredibly useful to the state as large monolithic entities. It's much easier to spy on people and exert influence. Imagine the feds chasing dozens of social media platforms to fight election interference.
There is no chance any legislative body will break up tech. They'll more likely go the bank route and make them too big to fail, and regulate them, which amounts to giving the government direct or indirect power in what speech is allowed on the platform.
Dot com explosion had a long tail. IT was for losers in the 00s and everyone wanted to be a quant and work for GS. The field was very unsexy.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/10/ubers-david-plouffe-to-join-...
Big tech is the existing reality and it can only be changed by making it obsolete. The digital technology for doing so is actually available (or can be refined rapidly). What is not available is the social technology: the attitude of governments and regulators, solid, honest-to-goodness business models, the education of the populace etc
Decentralized technology is rife with fraud and noise, but ENS is an exemplary preview of a Web3 future. Like SSO without a middleman. It's a far superior user experience (no password requirements, email verification, data leaks), and allows developers to bypass account management altogether when building a webapp. To me, it's glaringly obvious this is one of the most significant milestones in our transition to a better web.
Implementing centralized application rules on completely decentralized compute/networking foundations is now a thing.
Let's say you want to build something like Mars Coin. It's gotta work reliably at the scale of billions of nodes, separated by minutes of transit time, at billions of aggregate transactions per second, at a cost below micro-cents per transaction. Without the possibility of being shut down by a government-scale bad actor.
This is now becoming possible: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/mars-coin/
Good luck competing when your innovation can be copied by tech giant in a matter of months, your price tag could be beaten overnight with dumping, and your business could be bought out to suffocate in the basements of Alphabet.
Fortunately, our society both understands the dangers of monopolies, and has tools (regulations) to balance them out. Could anti-monopoly lawsuits happen that would force break big tech? That has happened in the past, see Bell System[1]
Are Shopify, Stripe, and Square not big tech? Maybe medium-big instead of mega-big?
Is OP mainly just talking about Amazon's dominance of online consumer shopping specifically, rather than a general thing about "big tech"?
Scale is something we have not really taken on board as we head to 10 billion humans. And when we look critically at the Big in big tech now, they are really bit-players with leverage. News aggregators, search engines, publishing platforms. The traditional "media" have had outside influence and this new globalised generation has that, but compared to what's likely to come it's nothing.
Global pharma, energy, transportation, new manufacturing, supply chain observability, consumer friendly finance. These things and more will have huge impacts - and all will have software at their hearts.
If that (software) is what we mean by Tech, then yeah, Google is a minnow to come.
But there is hope. Software (and observability) are incredibly amenable to democracy and independent monitoring, to smart regulation and smart outcomes.
It's a political challenge to manage the wealth to come - but look at how the USA handled the robber barons. It took massive system wide political change if it happened.
Don't give up. But Vote Harder.
Many people nowadays were essentially 'forced' to move country or cities because of purely financial reasons driven by the money printers. This is all artificial and it will unwind.
Even if those companies were overvalued, it doesn’t change the fact that technology and free trade enable hyper-scaling businesses.
Without currency debasement, people may have been incentivized in the past to move to cities for certain industries where knowledge was highly specialized (the company needed to be in a big city with many people in order to tap into a larger talent pool).
Today, where most intellectual work can be done remotely, it doesn't make sense to move people geographically to specific geographic areas.
It maybe a "no true scotsman" argument but a society that legally oppresses a minority is hard to call a democracy- it is quite possible to argue that America was not a democracy until 1965.
And it is highly unlikely we will all become some homogeneous voting lump - there are enough modern democracies that are so distinct in just their voting processes, let alone choices in fiscal policy, culture and so on to keep diversity alive.
On the other hand, rather than say that a society that legally oppresses a minority is not a democracy, I'd rather call it a flawed democracy or a bad democracy. Be aware that democracy by itself doesn't provide protections to prevent a majority from oppressing a minority, instead of refusing to calling it a democracy.
That way we don't end like the true communists. Whenever someone discusses any of the problems with communism a true communist always says: "no you see, that happened because it wasn't real communism", and they kind of miss the point of whatever constructive discussion you were trying to have with them.
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
As Ernest Naville said "in a democratic government, the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all". I think all the other minority rights required to even find out where majority support lies are implied. He seems to be thinking of full democracy, but minimal democracy requires the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. If a majority prevents the opposition required for a peaceful transfer of power, then it isn't democratic at all no matter how legitimate its original mandate.
History shows the very opposite. Oppression goes hand in hand with empires, dictatorships and colonial powers.
> At least the division of nations leaves people with the option to leave one democracy and go live in another that fits them better
You are confusing nations borders, democracy and decentralization.
Who do you think could make big tech fall? The politicians who think it's perfect the way it is or the ones who think it needs to be much worse?
The problem is not that you coffee store can do ecommerce, but that nobody can find your coffee store if it is not in amazon, or does not buy ads from google/facebook.
I also don't think tech will have long lasting monopolies, unless government regulation makes it so. Who's worried about IBM or Intel nowadays? Anyone using myspace or vine? All of these were dominant at one point.
I do expect a shift in investor mindset - right now tech companies are not held to the same profitability standards, so the tech stocks are very expensive for even wildly optimistic projections of future growth. It's as if the market is already pricing in a future monopoly for these companies. Given how fragile tech monopolies tend to be, I expect a correction at some point (not a good short though - no way to predict the timing)
This statement would be relevant here if these companies hadn't been replaced by even bigger monopolies. So if facebook and apple is replaced by something even bigger, the folks who are afraid of monopolies would have more to worry about.
The modern market does favor a handful of large players for each market - this is true in almost all sectors though. This not a monopoly though; as long as the top players change over time it is still a working market.
This is not a part of anyone's definition of 'monopoly', ever. Monopoly means dominance in a particular market - nothing more, nothing less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
Foursquare’s Swarm has a monopoly on social network checking in to places with optional photos + logged notes.
Tiago Forte has dominance in courses/in depth, varied content on building a second brain.
Readwise.io has dominance in spaced repetition learning from synced data.
There’s only one or two sites/communities for my personality disorder that doesn’t get much attention. They dominate the market.
There’s only one app that has you put up money for habits/challenges you complete via video selfies. Spar App (side note: horrible ownership/stewards of the app)
There was previously one community forum for video game site owners.
[almost] all of these have [near] 100% of their market. I don’t believe people would consider any of them monopolies.
This wouldn't mean there are no big software companies. But it would mean that end-to-end providers like Amazon no longer dominated.
Because if you've worked at these companies, you know you can spin circles around them in execution speed alone. Not to mention way too many things are too small scale for them to even pay attention to.
And if your successful, they would rather buy you most of the time than make a competitor because it's probably cheaper for them in many cases. In startup world, it's pretty rare they go the copycat route. You can cite examples, but that is survivorship bias ignoring the many more they do not copy.
The biggest issue with bigtech is actually hiring. They suck up the labor market and make it hard to get good people affordably. The good employees rationally do what is best for them and go work at bigtech, which includes me.
Until you get a cool idea and can't stomach fighting the corporate bureaucracy to make it happen, so you start your own company. Like every generation of entrepreneurs before you.
That's quite a rare thing if you look at the overall picture
I think disruption occurs at certain watershed moments where a rapid paradigm change occurs: www, bitcoin, mobile, social, ecommerce, PC, internet. At these moments, growth is so fast and belief is so strong that a movement of previously untapped energy forms around it and this becomes a focal point for investment, concentrated at a single point in spacetime which is powerful enough to penetrate a monopoly.
But only if growth is so abrupt that it can't acquire you first.
And the capitalists are not going to fund the disruption as by definition capitalists operate at a scale where they can't understand it.
The tech giants are not only good at whatever they're doing but are also capable of refreshing their expertise every 5 years or so, or even reinventing themselves as necessary. Neither Google nor Facebook are the same companies as they were 15 years ago.
I worry that like some of the major [evil] banks that survived world wars and major crises, the tech giants aren't going away, and neither will it be easy to compete with them.
1) Even if Big Tech is not allowed (or chooses not to) compete directly, they’ve invested massively in creating platforms that power everything, especially other tech companies. eg Every new company starts off in AWS/GCP and most mature companies run their services on the cloud. It seems unlikely that they will be displaced here.
2) They’ve created an unprecedented concentration of skills, both in building and operating systems at scale. We do see a lot of scholarly material coming out of eg Google that has inspired OSS tools (not to mention directly to OSS like K8s or Android) and a bunch of SRE principles by employees (current or former) but with their lucrative compensation and career growth opportunities it looks like Big Tech will do just fine in attracting and retaining this talent.
Which makes me somewhat skeptical if the big tech era will end anytime soon.
One thing I have noticed is friends quitting big tech to join startups and many that remain saying that it’s quite boring; If big tech culture does change in a meaningful way, I see that as a much bigger threat to their dominance.
Mammals have only made it 200-250M years, humans *far* less.
and it's not clear the dinosaurs are gone (looks at a bird).
I've seen many HN readers claiming they can build a FB clone overnight, but that's not even the tip of iceberg. Serving your service to billions of people across hundreds of different languages, cultures geographical areas with different legal, financial, logistical infrastructures is at the fundamentally different level of complexity than building a toy project. This is not just for big techs, there are literally thousands of uninteresting but extremely profitable businesses simply for this very reason. And big techs owns platform which brings them to another level...
The article correctly states that monopolies aren't going to last long. But what the author didn't realize is there will always gonna be monopolies because the way society is constructed and the markets works incentivizes building monopolies.
We are in the game of Monopoly. If a player lasts until the end of the game he is doomed to build a monopoly.
Microsoft is still there with a $2.4T market cap. In the context of a discussion about big tech, Netflix is not really part of it. Although the FAANG acronym kind of stuck.
Besides, I didn't see any good acronym with only A and M...
Edit: I earlier didn't notice the Facebook name and logo turning dynamically into the Meta name and logo, but that doesn't actually make the argument weaker.
It was so great to use different incompatible file formats/office suites when you wanted to send a file to someone.
Uh, what? Microsoft is currently the 2nd largest company in the world, sometimes it’s the largest. Do you have any idea how many people use say, Office 365 in a given week?
Netflix is 1/10th of the size by market cap, I don’t understand why it’s even a part of the acronym.
Personally, I hold individual shares of MSFT and AAPL and no other big tech company exposure outside of index funds.
Because the amount it pays developers. The acronym is used in conversations about high paying tech / programming / IT jobs.
Remember the 1990's install/configuation programs that were styled as "wizards", some including a silly pointy hat icon or character with a wand. Personally, I just could never buy into that metaphor.
You've seen it before, with IBM, blockbuster, the entire music industry. Business entities get big and think their size protects them from disruption, they begin to implement abusive policies that pay off short term and don't worry about long term because they think their size protects them. This gravy train could go on forever it appears in the moment. Of course we have the advantage of hindsight.
I think the same thing is beginning to happen to big tech. They're beginning to abuse users. Simultaneously, there are lots of alternative options to all of their products being developed.
I see either them being supplanted by new companies (with a couple of course adapting and surviving), or the industry being disrupted heavily by novel ideas. I'd prefer the latter of course, but I will take either.
This is not a good example. In 2000 , it wasnt harder for the coffee shop to make a website than it was for amazon, and their challenges were similar: how to accept payments and how to deliver. Amazon solved those through scale, the coffee shop did not solve either of them (the author admits they send their kid to do deliveries). Accepting payments problem is easier today, but still not easy, and still not comparable with the world of cash where everyone everywhere has equal access to payments.
Without some massive new tech that will break the moats of bigtech (payments, logistics network, lock-in via identity) i dont think bigtech will unbundle
1. historically institutions get larger and larger until busted up
2. they tend to buy out anyone who has a better technology and swallow it up
3. technology isn't going anywhere.
The main input of the social networks is US, and our consent. If they break our trust, we start looking around for alternatives, and it might take a while, but we all hold grudges, and will route around their damage.
We must retain access to general purpose computing, if we do that, we can keep routing around their mistakes, accidental, or not.
They do not know the wizards. Even the article uses Bezos as the target for the "wisest wizards" link. He is a king, not a wizzard! The wizzards are beink kept out of sight in the castles. And the royal courts issues statements that they do not exist. You merely have to use SAFE, Cloud, Containers, etc to have the same results.
Until the government finds a way to cap the size of companies, or keep them split up... companies will continue to grow.
Maybe big tech will end with the era of megatech.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntN4q7vuPUI
I agree with the author that the future is unclear. I think it possible that the current tech megacorps might suffer a decline but if I was betting money I am not sure what fair odds would be. Tossing my own prophecy into the discussion: I think that we will see a combination of smaller distributed decentralized tech and businesses, but some of the giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. will continue to do well as long as they keep enough customers happy.
The big tech era is in fact now just starting. The big corporations finally realized nobody is seriously challenging them so they will only tighten the grip gradually from here on.
I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access.
Keep your guard up, folks, and improve your hardware operation skills -- and any physical real-life skills in general. We can't all be dependent on the corps, they must always be shown we can do without them and we only tolerate them because they are not too unpleasant.
I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising if some companies will want to start owning and running their own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is -- is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).
The major exception for us is S3, scaling storage seems like it would suck terribly.
Not just companies. Web developers love the complexity of their stack. Some monolith written in native performant language and put on a decent hardware can cover needs of the most reasonable size business. This simple fact makes them very uncomfy when presented. Many of them would not be even aware that such things are possible. They'd rather be spoon fed by the likes of the Amazon telling them how to develop their wares. The fact that the more inefficient their software is the more money said Amazon will make is ignored. They'd invent all kinds of largely BS arguments to avoid going a simpler route. One can just read numerous articles on HN describing "our stack". On a client site they have this React atrocity. Sure this thing works well for orgs the size of FB. But they're not FB and never will be.
Distributed redundancy is a good example. There are very, very few situation in which this couldn't be resolved with a simple BGP daemon on a server and anycast.
I have 3 spare laptops lying around; weakest of them is with a Celeron J4155 and I have put a web app with no caching on it (it does have a persistent DB) and hammered it with my workstation until it finally started giving up at ~2500 req/s (Elixir/Phoenix stack). Again, that's a Celeron J4155 with a SATA III SSD in an M.2 factor (so disk speed caps at 550MB/s at best; usually 400-460) and 12GB RAM. Most programmers wouldn't touch such a machine.
I imagine I can buy 2 more of these laptops and make a completely replicated 3-cluster of the entire stack of our company and the slowest requests (on admin UI where we have a lot of SQL JOINs) would likely never go above 200ms. That totals at about 600 EUR (yep, I bought the laptop second-hand for 200 EUR). Then 500 more EUR for a good UPS to plug the laptops and my routers to. Boom 1100 EUR and several weekends later I can likely charge my own employer for hosting at 100 EUR a month for their entire infrastructure and I would likely still be ripping them off even with that.
The only real cost is human time and energy invested in making it work. But for most companies that's not a 24/7 fight so that cost is fairly low. You can do it twice a year and you're likely never going to have problems.
So yep, I am completely with you here (if my rant didn't make it obvious). Infrastructure costs are already being heavily optimized by companies out there.
If this were true, what made the cloud providers popular in the first place?
Hosting apps in the cloud was a fair exchange 10 years ago because operational tooling in general was more immature. Nowadays it's much easier to self-host many pieces of software though.
Also, outsourcing moves the blame to someone else if things go wrong. (and things in infra go wrong nearly constantly).
The problem with this kind of thinking is ofcourse, that there is no risk taking and innovation in suchs an organisation..
Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware. You get new resources by adding to wish lists and seeing if the end of quarter budget will agree with your request which might be filled in a few months, maybe next year, often never.
You hoard hardware that ends up doing nothing most of the time so you have it when you do need it. Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget.
With cloud you get what you want without asking too much and management periodically spearheads savings efforts to show off, but ultimately usually spends a lot more than they would have otherwise with less friction.
A big part of cloud adoption, according to my theory, is getting executives out of the way of computing resource needs and freeing up their time to fill with something else like bothering employees for more status updates (which are easier and require less skill).
The cost of these services is not because big tech has to use that much to run them, but because big tech would make less money if they lowered prices. AWS generates tons of profits, why lower that for no reason?
That's not the people we're talking about. Racking a server and setting it up to do virtualization takes maybe a few hours for one person, if that, over a period of years. Maintenance on the host itself is the same.
The real labor cost is in setting up and maintaining applications for your specific needs. None of that goes away by using someone else's hardware.
But AWS does a lot of that for you by offering cloud services and not just hardware. That is why people pay so much more for AWS than other just hosting solutions.
It also doesn't really work. Some textile company is going to have some line of business software to run their textile mill. Amazon doesn't provide that. You still have to do labor to configure it. These are the hard things, because they're custom and don't have a huge installed base of people who already encountered and solved all the problems you're going to have. But for the same reason, they're the things AWS doesn't provide.
What they provide is common things like DNS. But DNS is easy to set up and maintain, because it's common, and so already has smooth edges. That's not where the labor was going.
I bet most customers of cloud services are not in a high-growth phase, so this is scenario most organizations aspire to ("What if we suddenly got popular?" is a fantasy that's hard to disabuse someone of internally, if you want to be known as a team player
> Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want without asking too much...
I fully agree, this is the core reason why most companies gravitate towards cloud: management abdicates control of costs to engineers, resulting in less friction - but its OpEx, not CapEx, so the bean counters are chilled about it. If the same low-friction approach were applied to DC equipment, you'd get similar results, but cheaper.
This lasted for 11 years and only stopped because two of the 5 senior engineers retired and because the company was bought a few weeks earlier.
So again, don't look at this through Silicon Valley lens. Most of the companies in the world have a very different mold compared to SV.
Professional hardware is expensive and server h/w is a small part of it.
I grew up in this era and keep hearing this repeated but it simply wasn’t true. Enterprises would plan ahead and buy enough hardware for years and it would work fine until you bought more. The myth that you need to scale your infrastructure 10x in a day doesn’t apply to 99% of enterprises, and even if it did it’s probably a result of bad planning on the part of leadership. As a result of the current paradigm businesses end up renting servers at a substantial markup for fairly obsolete hardware.
Over a given period of time, computers get faster/cheaper by more than most businesses expand. When you need to expand, buying a newer, faster machine may cause you to save money because the faster machine uses less power than the existing one.
It gets really tempting to setup a backup/failover node on one of my spare laptops lately...
My old employer had a strategy which basically boiled down to owning everything inside this company expect for the coffee machines and cleaning crew. His reason being? This made it possible to run on very thight margins when the economy takes a downturn without having to scramble for money because of leased/loaned equipment etc.
In the 2008 crisis, this is how he stayed afloat with his company, and even made a pretty profit during a time of crisis too.
I don't think your salary counts as CAPEX, it's a normal monthly expense for the company.
It's true that cloud providers aren't reliably cheaper as some assumed at one point. But there's something to be said for cutting out the fully burdened costs of some number of employees (especially given everyone is saying tech talent is expensive and scarce at the moment) and just letting AWS deal with it even if you could theoretically do it cheaper yourself.
I had to laugh at someone's comment around re:Invent last week that just because Amazon has to offer 17 types of databases for its customers (or whatever the exact quote was) doesn't mean you have to collect them all as if they were Pokemon.
Where I work right now people don't just quit two days later. They like the company and if they feel they want to go someplace else they're not being difficult about it. They cooperate in passing down their knowledge to colleagues before they go.
This has now created an entire ecosystem of developers and "devops engineers" (what we used to call sysadmins) who know little beyond the cloud and have to keep using it for career-related reasons. This in turn pushes companies to use the cloud as finding talent for old-school on-premises infrastructure is difficult.
A lot of these threads end up talking about "scaling" from a pure hardware perspective. Once you start talking about medium-to-large companies, the real scaling headache is people, process, and organizations.
Obviously from one scale and on the cloud is very much worth it. IMO the discussion has to be shifted to "before which point you can easily get away without the cloud?".
My point never was to idolize on-prem; I have agreed in other comments that from one point and on the cloud absolutely wins.
I'm mostly pointing out that there is a lot you can do before bowing your head to Amazon and accept $30_000+ monthly bill for infrastructure that I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.
Time will tell but IMO it's super important to reserve the right to take a deeper look if you don't like your costs.
We're not as helpless as big tech wants us to believe.
I don't think that setting it up is main problem here. Keeping it up to date and secure is the hard part.
Right now they/we can't do it though, the talent is there but that talent is super busy reworking software that's no longer well-adapted to their new requirements. We'll see if the topic becomes more relevant in the future.
One can rent VMs from Hetzner at 1/3 the price of AWS (and 1/10 the data transfer fees). No managed services, like Dynamo or S3, but will full convenience of on-demand scale-up
Or, for mid-sized corporations - buying a rack of computers, wiring them together, and installing OpenStack to make an internal cloud - that isn't some black magic wizardry either
It's not a matter of outsourcing culture. Cloud providers really do provide computing in a cost efficient matter since they practically provide IT infrastructure at wholesale, and it produces an anti-trust risk because, as you pointed out, the actual hardware that can make it go is not nearly as expensive.
And we don't have the requirements of most big Silicon Valley companies that you reference. It boggles my mind why so many commenters IMMEDIATELY assumed we're a hyper-growth startup or whatever. We're an expanding data provider and our growth is super predictable, and our set of requirements changes like once a year.
So really, not sure why you and others keep repeating things I already agree with. The cloud wins from one point / scale and on, absolutely; otherwise it wouldn't ever take off. I am saying that people give up way too quickly and run to the cloud long before they need it -- that's all.
So it pays off to be wary of filter bubbles. The SV way of doing things assumes a ton of VC money to burn, something that, to this day, is still not a wide trend in the EU (even if it happens here and there).
Plus that company's setup is not unusual in any way per se; the only "unusual" thing is "we don't run to the cloud at the first IT problem". A ton of other companies are like this, I'd bet even in the US.
Even with the specs you mentioned, you can rent a lightsail server that is comparable on AWS for like 80 usd a month, so I would push back against the idea that using cloud services in pretty much any scenario is a purely technical decision.
Part of the context of discussing things this way is the original article: do the prevalence of service companies signal the end of big tech? I would say no, because the only way to not be reliant cloud service providers is to do what you describe and compete directly with their infrastructure services by forming your own technical infrastructure. But the logical conclusion to doing things this way is that eventually whoever can control more physical infrastructure has an advantage. What if Amazon is able to replicate your service offerings? They would be able to immediately able to offer their version using their cloud services at a fraction of the price because they can amoratize the cost of computing over their cloud business. Then, when they have eliminated you as competition, they can recoup everything by increasing the price. This is a HUGE anti-trust concern, and one that all tech companies should be at least a little bit concerned about in the long term. It doesn't go away because you can have an (in your case more expensive than lightsail) up front investment to own your companies computing resources.
Give me an AWS service with predictable billing and ability to put hard limits so you don't have your credit card charged for surprising amounts if you get bursty unexpected loads, and I'll be all over them without thinking of on-prem hosting.
It would be a lot preferable for there to just be multiple computing resource providers, rather than just three, but the reality is that setting yourself up as a cloud provider is quite inaccessible. Democratizing the industry of cloud services will probably require regulation.
Colo is cheap, connectivity is cheaper then it has ever been, and most bussiness don't require massive scaling to do their bussiness.
Also, owning your own infra allows you to innovate and play a game outside of the borders aws, gcp and azure are drawing up for you.
I hate having to learn all of AWS, GCP and Azure proprietary tech, I’ll take a Linode box any day thank you
But most of the problem isn't with infrastructure. Once you start using AWS's services it is the software that is most problematic. And that is why all these infrastructure / cloud provider wants to do serverless.
However, Cloudfront, JSDeliver, etc are a pain. I understand the benefits of caching javascript locally to me, but I want to see companies start hosting their scripts all from their own servers.
If FontAwesome isn't already a tracking company, it's only a matter of time. Cringy-cool name, tentacles throughout the web, all for _fonts_. I'm a senior fullstack dev and I get tradeoffs, but the technical-societal-tradeoffs of the web are bewildering.
In some way wish it is ending. As human society, we don't need any more mega big company. Everything ought to kept local and small and diverse, so there is no central control, it is only resilient way to thrive for tech and innovation.
IMO the far left challenging free speech is a bit of a trojan horse. Yes, you can use censorship to suppress distasteful ideas, but it's also obvious that if you give corporations the power to censor whatever they want, they will also use it to censor anything you say to criticize them. Look at what the Chinese government is doing, they can basically erase anything that makes China look bad from the internet in less than 30 minutes. Is that what we want here too?
Free speech is not a "far right" idea. It's the basis of democracy.
In the end the powerful remain powerful, and the weak remain weak. IMO much of democracy is a smokescreen. With apologies to Marx, the opiate of the masses is democracy.
I don't care if I group up with "lefties" or "righties" to make important societal changes happen. If they are on board with the vision, let them believe in Santa if they need that to sleep better.
Yeah, and rightwing is a bunch of saints that never deplatformed anyone?
This is a problem that will prevail forever and can't be solved easily. We can experience today too in china the government do crackdown but most of us hate it right? If they don't regulate they grow beyond party.
(Taking example of china because I don't know other country which does crackdown on big giants like this)
Big tech piles up large amounts of cash as it is and they have no idea what to do with it (other than shovel it back to shareholders). They have far beyond the margins they need to keep expanding, even with a 50% income tax. So the first thing it would do is cut into shareholder returns (less cash), their multiples would contract as investors would find them less appealing. Half of America is invested in big tech (in one form or another), and those are by far the most active voters. If they see their portfolios tank due to a huge hike in corporate income taxes, they'll promptly punish the politician/s that are responsible for it. Big tech would keep growing at 50%, so what's the alternative? 70%-80%? It's unlikely to ever have the support required to get it passed, it just plain sounds very egregious as a policy. At very high levels it comes across as: we like to punish success; and that's how it would be run against politically by the other side (Republicans).
Instead you have Americans refusing to go to the doctor because they're afraid of the bill.
> https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown-3305...
Total Revenue is $4T, Total Spending is $6T, and
> Social Security will be the biggest expense, budgeted at $1.196 trillion. It's followed by Medicare at $766 billion and Medicaid at $571 billion.
That is $1.35T spent on healthcare just for old people (over 65) and poor people. And it is not even the whole amount, since most 65+ people still have to buy insurance. Even if you cut out the 5% profit margins of managed care organizations, or even 15% assuming their function is wholly unnecessary, it still seems unlikely universal health can be offered without increasing tax revenues.
In 2019, total healthcare spend for all of US was $3.9T.
Aged, blind, disabled, and poor, plus less poor children and pregnant women.
The original claim by smus was that the US could pay for all healthcare, presumably without increasing taxes. I find that hard to agree with. Even if we assume we can cut 25% overhead from the $4T total, the US would still need to come up with $1.5T+ to meet $3T total healthcare spending.
I do not see it happening without increasing taxes. Which may not make any effective difference other than to redudant employees of managed care organizations (MCOs) who get laid off, because presumably the premiums currently getting paid to the MCOs simply get collected as taxes.
The federal share is not the whole public cost; Medicaid is a state/federal cost sharing program.
We already spend more per Capita than countries with socialized medicine, so it stands to reason we should be able to socialize our medicine with a reasonable increase in expenditure on health care.
That extra money doesn't need to come from raising taxes. It can come from our incredibly bloated "defense" budget
It’s a more interesting question to ask if this would be more economically efficient.
it's almost self-evident that it would be more efficient. the more interesting questions are how and why. fair and efficient markets at steady-state would largely be composed of a few medium-sized companies and a bunch of small companies, with new entrants occasionally. that would enable healthy competition that would drive progress while keeping chaotic upheavals mostly at bay. it would also distribute wealth more widely, which means we'd get more diverse ingenuity and more interesting entrepreneurship, rather than having the capable simply stowing away at large companies taking their safe and boring little toll on the income river.
Fab’s are built at such scale in part because finished chips are really easy to ship being both durable and value dense. They also benefit from that scale because of the nature of the lithography process which has many individual steps which need to be done in the same factory, but each step is very fast and operates on a full wafer at the same time. Millions of chips per year is basically the minimum scale that’s in any way reasonable.
That’s a small enough pool that individual failures starts to seriously consolidate the market. It’s already down to a handful of companies that can currently manufacture modern chips and if anything that number is likely to shrink rather than grow.
I was lately thinking about some kind legislative action against network effects. Let's make it easy to migrate to other platforms.
Obvious way to do this is to require big companies to implement "data export" feature with specification.
It is a common problem for data model migration, even outside the context of the big tech companies. I've had cases where the systems were effectively not replicable even though the data was made available because the source system relied on some bespoke piece of data infrastructure software that no one else was likely to replicate. (Even hypothetically open sourcing this infrastructure isn't that helpful because it is usually extremely specific to the operational environment for which it was designed -- you can't drop it into your operational environment.)
All of which adds so much asymmetric friction and cost, which the source provider does not incur, that merely making data models exportable tends to generate limited user value in data models that inherently encode network effects.
You would not enjoy an iPhone made by your local electrician.
Here you've defined "better" to include "can ship very large quantities", which is almost a circular way of defining the answer to be negative, no matter what the company does.
If it can ship very large quantities, it's not a small company.
Those are three pretty huge things... For me personally, repairability is secondary to their very convenient modular IO port system.
> Less polished OS UI.
You can have them install Windows without the typical manufacturer bloatware or you can put *nix on it. For me, that's better than macOS.
> worse screen resolution
The resolution on the MacBook Pro 13 and the Framework are nearly the same: 2560 x 1600 vs 2256 x 1504.
Imagine what would happen if Rome made those big and long roads all across Europe and then nobody used them out of respect of all the labor that went into them. :D
However, IMO both Apple and Microsoft are at best indifferent to their customers. Not fixing bad UIs even when people complain, putting ads in products you paid for, requiring centralized accounts just to install free apps. You've heard it all before.
I wouldn't enjoy an iPhone made by my local electrician, but I want software to respect me. Linux DEs have genuine flaws and yet I truly miss nothing and gain everything when I move from my work Macbook or my gaming Windows partition to my Linux desktop.
I don't think the decision is between a vertically-integrated big-corp device and a vertically-integrated small-corp device. Even just the current iPhone hardware (which is absolutely incredible engineering) with free software would be a big improvement.
- Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.
That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset.
For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429
[1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...
Not really "the vast majority" ...
I believe the problem on Google's side is that it is easier to do good services on easy stuff, like mail and simple search querries like "who is the president in Finland" or "when does X close".
So Google prioritizes trivia searches over searches an unsophisticated dentist would querry to look up some procedure.
Programmers just seem to rely more on websearches where other fields have like magazines, workplace courses and conferences.
I know none of the former who have built self-promotion-based $multi-million empires. I wish that were true of the latter.
The magic and evil of software and hardware is that you don’t have to understand it to use it. Elon musk memed people into crypto.
I boycott Facebook, Amazon, and Disney.
How is having and deciding to live by a set of personal principals, even if there isn’t an outcome on “market forces” in any remote way comparable to believing you’re a bird?
Cynically I suspect the lobbyists defeat it before it is even signed (ensuring the legislation has appropriate loopholes, etc).
Big tech is unlikely to attack that way. It's far better for big tech to stop these things via new technology, rather than try a political process which will require expensive brib^W lobbying and is subject to backlash. Big tech have a far bigger advantage on the tech front than the political front.
PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).
Gmail is pretty much a standard right now (even if there's no public technical standard involved; only Google's apps can communicate with Gmail). That's monopoly dressed as "new technology".
In the meantime the pressure in the EU is mounting between the both camps of the encrypted messaging ecosystem.
So yeah, both things are happening in parallel.
> PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).
Yeah, you're sadly correct. I dread the day when this will start becoming the norm. But it's also true that many common citizens can stop using service X or Y and it would cost them nearly nothing (with some prominent exceptions like Gmail or Whatsapp).
It's no wonder FB is pretty much always positive about this law or that law that will supposedly regulate tech in one way or another.
'Offline' internet can come back, we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing, maybe go online from time to time to get the newest /etc/hosts from your friends and the new locations for microsd cards near you.
Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.
Pi zero 2W costs 10$ and with 40$ screen you can watch feynman lectures with mplayer -vo fbdev, it boots into vim for 3 seconds (init into openvt -w vim kinda thing).
Soon the-eye.eu will be back (hopefully).
The new phrack is out.
The social networks are eating themselves, same as google is eating itself, the search is garbage, the feed is even more garbage, 99% of the content is anxiety inducing miasma.
The web is eating itself, with gazillions of GPT(ish) generated articles.
Let it go, life always finds a way.
> Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing.
> Pi zero 2W
Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of people with the skills necessary to use this is low. Not to mention that new generations have grown up with the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search for alternatives.
If things get really bad (a debate for which I'm not taking either side), only a very small minority will be able to use the aforementioned workarounds and can trivially be marginalized and crushed with legislation and its enforcement.
1. What is a Pi?
2. Where's the keyboard/mouse/screen?
3. What does "download a file" mean?
4. What does "run it" mean?
And as for using an Android... that immediately defeats the purpose since they're basically Google data vacuums.
You don’t need to do any of this this listen to the Feynman lectures.
Even though this is true, it is not impossible to expand their horizon. We still have not figured out the pedagogy or even andragogy of how to teach technology.
Check out my progress with my daughter(10): https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids, We are also making a card game https://punkjazz.org/programming-time/easy.html to play with her and donate to other kids interested in learning.
Spending time with pi zero and arduino and building retropie games, using links2 instead of chrome from time to time, she is making great progress. Make the lights in her room work after few claps, with arduino nano and sound sensor so her code can control the light.
And this is only with 20-30 minutes per day.
You might think that the kids are blind to what is going on, but they do see, they know something is wrong, they know they are being exploited and cheated to buy lootboxes and skins.
:) at least it makes me feel like things are not as bad.
I repeatedly run the experiment to pitch a low-tech solution to a high-tech fund and aim exactly there:
Reduce the required skill to 1) signing a hosting contract and 2) copying a single file to that webspace. Really!
So that's several orders of magnitude more people than today. Instantly.
But got it the 3rd time officially now, that such would have no societal impact and isn't considered innovative, either. The time isn't here yet.
Then maybe the Eternal September will pass, and October will finally come.
In the meantime, more links about how these things are done will be appreciated.
You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.
ip, tcp and udp are the same, rip ospf and bgp are pretty much the same linux's skbuffs or bsd's mbufs are the same as before, the linux dma api changed a bit, but the ideas are the same.
there are some changes on the disk layers with geom and such, but nothing super fundamental
there are a bunch of layers of indirection now with VMs and cgroups, but deep down things are the same.
> You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.
there is nothing to win :) its just computers, dont take it so seriously
For a short while, when sneakernet was still higher capacity than the internet, people used to embed USB drives in trees and other public places. You'd walk up, plug in, and download the content. Things like full wikis of specialized subjects. Or videos of neighborhood events. Ideally, they were always made somehow read-only. I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen if they were read/write. We'd be right back to the internet we have today.
Still, it's something I do wish would have taken off. Maybe we could still do something like that today by setting up miniature web BBSes on hotspots in or near public parks. Not everything in the world should be open to the entire planet. As long as you weren't in a tourist district, you could be pretty sure the content was at least locally generated.
i will put all kinds of public domain data on it, from most of gutenberg books to all kinds lectures encoded with h265
will be so cool to have to go to the middle of the forest to download a book :)
the whole thing should cost no more than 30$ (biggest challenge is to make sure that the battery bursting in flames wont melt the case and set things on fire)
The fat that this website is down and only links to their Discord is very ironic.
But they seem particularly apathetic to the privacy considerations, robocalls and all things telemarketing, junk mail, insane product placement, and the blatant manipulation of our dopamine system by such corporations.
Does that sound like something that's going to end the big tech era or just keep driving it further?
That would suck, I hate ads but also just like split up subscription shows, not sure if I'm willing to pay for that either. There's so many I am currently subscribed to 3 different shows and maybe watch 1% of their content. I wanted to watch a movie and I would have had to get Paramount Plus like wtf... at least a lot of things show up on YT where I can rent it there.
My response is primarily about YT and mobile phone usage (where I don't have a browser extension adblocker). On mobile I don't open websites, just scan the suggested articles.
Except we went through this a few times already. E.g. on the consumer side, there was dot com (open), AOL (conglomerate), web 2.0 (open) and now FAANG (conglomerate).
This looks more like going in circles than one distincive trend.
1. Split all big tech
2. Introduce regulations to clearly specify interoperability rules between networks and ecosystems
3. Regulations to protect privacy of individuals
The problem is if they don’t happen together the big tech will have time to work around them and so the effect will not be as good. We don’t have the political will in this country to make that happen.
Similarly, the fact that politicians and the media are talking about big tech at a time when social media is being used to (depending on your politics) plan insurrections or deplatform the most important person in the world, doesn't seem like a misdirection from more relevant stories.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting is the purpose of these narratives, but I think you need to be careful that you're not implying that there is a sinister group of people who control the world's media, financial, and political systems, and are using that control to direct people towards "scapegoats" to distract the public from their own nefarious plots.
They’ll need to become more discreet and pay the right people more. Legally different companies will be controlled by the same group of people like some pseudo shadow board. Nothing new, nothing innovative.
Don’t get me wrong, things will change but be the same where it really matters.
The claim is that computation right now belongs to the nobilis and eruditus populus, and things like Excel and Hypercard that bring these things to the vulgus are pathetically limited... But, the story goes, maybe these new tools to wire a bunch of components together—payment gateways with wysiwyg website editors with email—constitute the beginning of a new world where the vulgus can also spread their wings and fly, rather than having to remain in the nest while us mature birds sail the updrafts of programming.
Microsoft was broken up and it's still "big".
So what do you do? Innovate with passion. And then what? They come and copy you and sell it at a greater scale, with more marketing $, growing some VPs pnl.
I do think where you still have a chance is software. Big tech still hasn’t cracked software. But it can’t be tech infra software (AWS) and not social software (Fb). So compete where they don’t play is the safest. Because when they try to compete at least they will go through buy or build and will either buy you (and kill your soul) or build a shitty version within.
It is NOT about the regulators!
NOT about regulators.
Their market cap is $1.7T because of AWS and the commission they collect from third party sellers and the recurring revenue from high margin streaming services. The sourcing and selling physical things to customer business is worth much less, as indicated by Walmart’s market cap of $390B.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
I'm sorry but the local coffee shop was never competing with Amazon in the first place. In fact, the local coffee shop further entrenched big tech because it did not setup its proper ecommerce website, host it on its own servers and processed payments with crypto instead.
The local coffee shop might have in fact jeopardized itself. Some local shops are still relevant because they cater to their specific area. By going online, this shop might give valuable information to what this special area is demanding; and if Amazon can buy this data, it's only a matter of time before the local coffee shop is doomed.
> Firms begin to incorporate magic into their production processes. Some wizards specialize in helping particular sectors. Gradually, the dark arts diffuse into the population. The magic becomes mundane.
I have very high doubts. The pandemic did push people online but I hardly find people learning development or technical skills; or at least trying to incorporate them into their workflows. They, at best, use the plug&play tools with no idea how these things work or without even reading the license. They also have no idea how their personal data is used and do not really care.
The OP example of the local coffee shop is revealing. The coffee shop did not build his own website, did not run his own local server and did not process digital crypto payments. He could have done all of that and relied on no company to run his stack. Instead, he just setup a Shoppify store that has everything as plugins and pays a subscription to that.
Regulators are NOT the key!