Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

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Sometimes, I wonder if for the sake of small business and general good, if horizontal integration should be heavily regulated and restricted for publicly traded companies (not private ones).

For example, Apple. Why aren't the software and hardware divisions separated, at a minimum? Furthermore, I might wonder, why couldn't iPhone, iPad, Mac, Audio Accessories etc. be separate companies? Sure, you'd lose a ton of the integration that makes it special... but I wonder sometimes if the world would be a better place. Same for Microsoft: Why can't Windows, Office, Azure, Xbox, all be separate companies? If Windows was an independent company I think it would probably be way healthier for Windows at this point (less Microsoft bloat)...

I feel (just feel) that publicly-traded companies should be forced to pick a market segment and stick to it, and any other businesses that get too large (say, $1B revenue) must be broken off.

Software-hardware coevolution has large benefits to the consumer. What you are proposing is to just make the products worse and more expensive.

Here's the thing: That might be true, and yet, necessary for the good of society and the good of the long-term.

See, for example, Standard Oil. They massively lowered oil prices - we broke them up. See also AT&T. Once their usefulness as a monopoly ran out, we broke them up.

Plus, we can see that hardware-software coevolution has large benefits - but who is to say that having companies separate does not also have large benefits of its own? You might not have Windows shoving Microsoft Teams and Edge and Bing down your throat... or Apple pushing Apple Music to your parents. If Apple can't integrate, perhaps we'd have more open standards for interoperability.

Regulating horizontal integration seems like it would be very difficult. How exactly would those horizons be clearly defined?

I’ve always thought of Apple having an emphasis on vertical integration(hardware+software=product). So maybe their foray into services would be the line in the sand?

I tend to agree with you, or at least the sentiment of “not perpetual growth”, but I think then we run into the problem that the US might lose dominance in various industries to countries who won’t throttle their corps like that

Which maybe isn’t the worst. Maybe we’d see an exodus of the rats in our own govt and leadership as they chase their efforts into the new world leaders.

Maybe this is the end stage of capitalism and while it was a good experiment to get us into worth surplus it comes at the cost of liberty. Maybe at some point we just need to tweak the entire economic system into the next era.

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