Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

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> That's funny. Whatever happened to vision and innovation? Improving the world and people's lives? Achieving great things through technology? Empowering people?

Unironically, they've already done that.

Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.

Facebook connected the world to all their friends and relatives.

Amazon first revolutionized e-commerce, making it possible to buy almost anything from almost anywhere. Then they revolutionized server computing, making it possible for anyone to spin up a software backend and scale it out without buying or leasing your own servers.

Apple got pocket sized general purpose computers into the pockets of the majority of people in the world (through iPhone and inspiring Android).

Google enabled people to find pretty much any piece of human knowledge or information.

The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.

>Microsoft put a PC on every desk, running Microsoft software.

As someone who was in the industry in the 90s and 00s, and saw just how many man-hours were wasted in dealing with problems caused by MS's buggy and insecure software, I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives". Even at the time, there were far better alternatives available; they just didn't have the same marketing or lock-in advantages.

I'll grant you the stuff about FB, Amazon, and Google though, and maybe Apple with their iPhone.

>The problem is, once those goals were accomplished, there was a still a need to keep revenue and profits rising. Which always seems to end up with selling ads at some point.

Yep, this is the problem: unsustainability. These companies should have been able to shift into a "utility provider" type status where they don't really grow much (except from expanding population, or new untapped global markets), where they can simply provide a fairly constant service and have a regular revenue stream.

> I don't really count this as "improving the world and people's lives".

Microsoft provided the operating system that allowed the commoditised IBM PC, and later laptops, to launch.

Without this, no Google, no Amazon and no FB.

Put another way, if every workstation still cost $5k and up to own, far fewer people would have bothered in the first place.

No complaints about your views on Microsoft software ;) I'd argue I'm not sure Google or Amazon are "making the world a better place" when you get into the details, but this is purely about the wider impacts of their strategy.

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