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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

HN used to be a more balanced place, but the broader "techlash" of the last ~5 years has fully engulfed it. HN is a negative and cynical place today. Discussions about future developments are dominated by the bad things that are happening, will happen etc. In fact in many instances you will not even see positive articles about a particular topic.

Someone working on an exciting new electric aircraft? Discussion is about how they're a fraud. Tesla ships a million EVs a year? Discussion is about how terrible they are. Big tech releases new product? Complain about privacy. New kubernetes feature? Kubernetes is complicated crap.

If this is the dominant disposition of people here, is it any wonder it bleeds into their broader views? I've started spending more time in more balanced places like Twitter and Reddit. I still read HN, but with the understanding that I'll only see one side of the story here.

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> HN is a negative and cynical place today. Discussions about future developments are dominated by the bad things that are happening

Funny you feel this way because I've seen the opposite. Any real discussion of the severity of the issues facing us getting quickly flagged and down voted. A bit of cynicism is okay, but saying "look we're in big trouble here, and tech might not be the answer" is met with pretty strong aggression.

For example any article about serious problems related to climate change is immediately flooded with "this is fine" comments, and anyone proposing that we may be facing severe problems in the near future is down voted or flagged immediately.

HN cannot handle the possibility that our future is not as bright as we though when we got into this industry. A bit of mourning is completely understandable, but the rapid denialism on this site make visiting here an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

Well discussing future technology would be interesting if it was realistic. Electric aircraft are not and probably never will be. Tesla does not have a special advantage over other car makers. California has trouble even keeping its electric grid powered all the time. Big tech is building a surveillance infrastructure that would make Orwell blush and at the same time stiffing innovation. Historically innovation has almost always come from small companies.

I’m picking out two statements that seem questionable. The rest of what you say, I am in agreement with.

> Tesla does not have a special advantage over other car makers.

This seems like the least accurate of your statements. Tesla has a very different engineering culture to other car makers and a very different outlook on what it is trying to achieve. Culture is impossible to replicate.

This is very similar to the advantage Apple had in early 2000s, and is very real.

> Historically innovation has almost always come from small companies.

Does it? What makes you say this? It’s hard to think of examples.

Apple is a great example of innovation coming from a small company at the start. Although to be more precise, it was the application of somebody elses innovation they got right (and more importantly, got the timing right). It took Apple and the other personal computer companies a couple of tries to get their product fit and pricing right but when it happened they created an entirely new market segment. The only really big player in that segment for a long time was Tandy.

Big companies all start small, they innovate their way to big and then start crushing innovation in every way they can in their market segment, which makes them stagnant and leaves room for new innovations from small companies to take over. It happens over 10, 20 and even 50 year time frames depending on how good the big companies are at crushing innovation (buying them out, pricing them out etc).

As a small company, your best bet is start in some niche they don't notice until you get big enough that you can't go away any more. Which brings us back to the Apple 2.

Yes, it’s almost the only example anyone can think of, and yes, I agree that the Apple 2 was good product innovation and identified a new segment.

However that segment was transient. The business use case in the medium term was far better served by the IBM PC, which all but eliminated the use of the Apple 2 as anything more than a home computer.

The Mac, of course, was largely based on innovations made by Xerox, then a giant corporation, who licensed them to Apple on ludicrously favorable terms.

This was an example of Jobs as a great dealmaker. Of course Apple built on top of the innovation they bought, but without Xerox there would have been no Mac.

Well then, compaq is another great example. Quickest company to a billion in sales at the time. Built an IBM clone on venture capital and IBM ignored them until they were first to market with a 386, managed to kill the PS/2 architecture and became.the industry trend setter in desktops for a decade.

Every american household had an RCA product at one time, dominant electronic manufacturer torn to shreds by upstart Japanese minnows who became giants (Sony, Pioneer).

Tandy, once a minnow, then an innovative giant in PCs killed dead by Dell and other startup clone makers.

Yahoo and AOL murdered by a tiny startup called Google.

Digital Equipment Corporation, once giant killers themselves in minicomputers, a segment they defined with the pdp and vax machines, slaughtered by upstart Sun Microsystems.

The examples are literally endless.

These aren’t examples of ‘innovation’ coming from small startups at all. All you’ve really shown is that startups can be successful sometimes, and simply ignored the fact that large companies keep going and in fact do keep innovating.

Take Google for example. AOL wasn’t murdered by Google at all. It was murdered by the internet. Yahoo, wasn’t murdered by Google either. It simply made bad investments.

Google on the other hand, came up with one excellent innovation as a startup. But everything else they have done, they did as a giant company.

Google proves that almost all innovation comes from large companies.

Maybe pick up a book now and again.

Google did stop innovating, all the subsequent progress they made aside from gmail was acquisition of startups. Android being the most obvious one.

Yahoo and AOL were killed by google, i am old enough to have seen that play out live.

> Maybe pick up a book now and again.

Maybe try reading the HN guidelines.

> Google did stop innovating, all the subsequent progress they made aside from gmail was acquisition of startups.

Obviously false. They bought technologies from startups, but those products didn’t stand on their own. Maps is the obvious example.

> Android being the most obvious one.

If you had any idea what Android was before Google bought it you wouldn’t say this. I do. I saw it.

> Yahoo and AOL were killed by google, i am old enough to have seen that play out live.

Do you even know what Yahoo and AOL were?

Yahoo was a web directory, and later a portal. That wasn’t killed by Google. Indeed Google was offered for sale to Yahoo for $1M. What killed Yahoo was just not being good at business.

AOL was a dial up information service that pre-dated the consumer internet. It had groups and communication services and in fact everything it needed to be Facebook.

Failure to adapt to the internet killed AOL. Not Google.

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