Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

No. The big tech era won't stop. IBM got replaced by Microsoft. Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs, FAANGs will get replaced by other more ferocious animals.

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.

View on HN

> Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs

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.

MAGMA is a better acronym nowadays, as Microsoft is far larger than Netflix, and Facebook renamed to Meta.

What about google > alphabet?

Alphabet is more like a holding company which Google was put under, right? Google kept its name and its trademark. Compare https://about.google/ with https://about.facebook.com/ . The first is all about Google not Alphabet, while the second is about Meta and Facebook is not mentioned aside from the URL address*.

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.

In what universe did Microsoft get replaced ? Did you see the recent stock performance and jump in valuation of the company ? It is still a beast.

> Microsoft got replaced by FAANGs,

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.

> I don’t understand why it’s even a part of the acronym.

Because the amount it pays developers. The acronym is used in conversations about high paying tech / programming / IT jobs.

The acronym was concurrently used because of stock performance. I actually thought that was and is the larger reason it is used. Perhaps not on HN, but in general.

Have you written a document or spreadsheet for a company lately? Microsoft is happy that nobody thinks of these things when discussing antitrust, but do you remember when there were choices other than Word and Excel?

> but do you remember when there were choices other than Word and Excel?

It was so great to use different incompatible file formats/office suites when you wanted to send a file to someone.

Since Microsoft never got replaced, this doesn’t work out so well. To keep with the logic. A chunk of big tech will still be huge huge in 30 or 40 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com