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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment.

Why? (Genuine question).

Google is just some corporation, and one that’s been drifting for the last 15 years or more (since Schmidt left). They are not even a good actor, yet (and I don’t blame them for this) have sucked a lot of air out of the ecosystem.

Creative destruction is one of the key values (-> leads to benefits) of capitalism, and with US & EU antitrust asleep at the wheel we should be glad if Google is ground to dust and replaced by somethings (plural!) better.

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> Why? (Genuine question).

Because in an ideal situation (as indicated with your last sentence) you'd have a bunch of active competitors yielding up better and better products. Not one active competitor with the singular new thing and a couple of reactive competitors that can't get things right.

Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet. If ChatGPT sinks that innovation (or at least makes it non-free) the loss may be more than the gain.

There's a lot of work going on in transformers, generative models, and all sorts of other things in addition to LLVMs. I'm not too worried at this point of OpenAI or openai+microsoft having any sort of monopoly.

It appears that neither does openAI believe that as they were happy to sell 50% of their company in addition to all the ownership they'd already given away. That was clear harvesting.

> Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet.

Is it, really? Hard for me to come up with much of a meaningful list, even if you don't try to compare their history with outliers like PARC or Bell Labs. They are clearly spending but I don't see a lot of doing. They seem to have ignored Hamming's advice.

>Why? (Genuine question).

Because I was there to witness the disintegration of a company and the losses it created? Instead of layoffs, you have entire departments/factory shuttering.

When Nortel shut down, many engineers interviewed for BB (same province). I still remember how they looked when we told them we won't proceed with the hiring.

If Google were to collapse they'd be releasing a lot of skilled people into a hot job market. This isn't a case of shutting the "company town" heavy industry employer suddenly cutting a lot of blue collar people (many equally highly skilled but for jobs that require more infrastructure).

I understand the Nortel case (I remember those days), but the job scene in Ontario was quite different 20 years ago.

And that's certainly no reason to try to prop up a company that's basically a drag on the industry.

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