Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services.

Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having nothing to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same.

So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence that is suggested.

That ship has sailed. “Tech” is simply a positioning or branding term.

Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm.

The term has become so denatured that a new term, “deep tech” has been coined to mean what “technology company” used to mean.

My personal test for this is: what percentage of the company's total value is comprised of the intellectual property their software source code holds.

The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are.

No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of value tied up in their brand or their sales book of business.

Isn't that a test for a software company?

Texas Instruments' value is mostly in their integrated circuits IP (as well as manufacturing prowess, process knowledge, and a little bit of software). They're still solidly a "tech" company in my books.

Yeah, and what about the value of production hardware and infrastructure? (Stuff not being sold/transferred to customers.)

For example, imagine a company with very little proprietary code because they focus entirely on renting out their CPU/GPU/disk capacity, for supercomputing, databases, render-farms, cloud backup, etc. I'd still call that a "tech company."

It's also not clear how this "intellectual property of the source code" angle would accommodate the network-effects or value of a subscriber-base... Well, I suppose you could argue that such an asset doesn't require high-tech means, it could all be snail-mail.

You may find that Amazon would fall into the "traditional" on this scale.

I don't think it's sailed. I think the classes of people that feel like they're falling behind resent success. It doesn't matter where that success comes from. The solution isn't to try to disarm the agitated language. The solution is to help the losers succeed, too.

WeWork tried to brand itself as a “tech” company. I agree it’s possible to sus out what companies are actually in the technology space but the label is thrown around far too much.

It's a bit of both. "Tech" is any company that can rely on technology rather than manpower and raw materials to scale up. Everyone wants to position themselves as such, but the truth always shows up on the balance sheet.

Merely using technology is what all businesses do, from the inclined plane to the microprocessor these days.

An X business is one that differentiates itself on factor X. If they use it in a truly innovative way (which changes — what was innovative in the 90s is commodity today) or develop new technologies in house than you’re a tech business.

Yeah the non specificity irks me as a lifelong builder and engineer. I mean, welding and the cotton gin are tech if you want to frame it that way.

So is using acrylics or oils for painters. It may have been around for a while but it’s still technology.

A lot of the companies you mentioned have non trivial investments in ads. I recently was surprised to find how big of an ad business Adobe has for example. Not sure that these companies would cease to exist if it weren’t for advertising but ads do influence these companies’ products.

Everyone has an investment in ads. Think news media, movies, TV, fashion, your local grocery store, a bus with a billboard on its side. That's just how the world runs. If you want to hold it against them then you are basically ranting against all of capitalism rather than anything specific to "big tech".

> Everyone has an investment in ads. ... That's just how the world runs.

Sure and some people take issue with aspects of how the world runs and want to discuss it.

> If you want to hold it against them then you are basically ranting...

Bold to state that making a critique of the status quo automatically amounts to "ranting".

> ...against all of capitalism rather than anything specific to "big tech".

It is not unreasonable to critique capitalism.

It's important to make note of the fact that when we talk about tech giants having a notable investment in ads, it's not the mere display of ads. It's the capturing of profiles, selling of this information to the highest bidders, and the tracking of this display.

When you understand that, you know that is not how the world runs and is actually very specific to big tech as they pioneered this hyper specific shift. You do not have access to everyone's information who sees your billboard. You do however have access to exactly how many people in a certain area during a certain time with the income between 50-100k who are older men who enjoy football, has seen your digital ad. Hopefully that illustrates the difference well enough.

>If you want to hold it against them....

From 2018 to 2022, 95% of HN comments on the subject were against any form of Ads. Those who stood up for ads, were the absolute minority.

But then I guess you are right. Because those group of people are also the ones "ranting against all of capitalism".

remember ads are not "showing a picture of sugar water to promote sales", they are surveillance, identification and manipulation.

Thank you. I've always been bothered by this lack of seperation.

The 'dirty' parts of tech: * media * social media * PII repackaging and unethical sourcing * targeted ads

Neutral or clean parts: * e-commerce * business automation * technical and educational information

If only the neutral parts didn't heavily rely on the dirty parts most of the time rendering the separation kind of meaningless.

But all of these businesses have dirty, neutral and clean heavily commingled.

Meta is an ad company and has a device business and happen to use social media to sell ads.

Amazon is rapidly shifting to be an ad company, who happens to use an e-commerce platform to place ads. They bought a healthcare company who collects massive amounts of PII and provide affiliate programs which funnel traffic into their ads and marketplace.

Apple, Microsoft and Google all have ad units that are major contributors to their overall profitability.

Yeah that seems to be the issue. The mixing of product lines really muddies the water.

The most important word in the phrase is “big” not “tech”.

The problem with these firms is they have too much concentrated power, which they obtained through anti-competitive practices that are now cemented into the business model.

This is bad for society and it’s imperative on society to break up these entities and the power they wield as it’s incompatible with a democratic society.

So how do you propose to break them up.

And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?

People are using their own free will to use their products

> So how do you propose to break them up.

Court order, legislation.

> And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?

Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, for starters.

By the way that’s not the definition of a monopoly.

> People are using their own free will to use their products

From an artificially constrained set of options. Anti competitive behavior has clear definable negative outcomes, you can feign confusion if you want but it’s not confusing.

Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens must be governed and restrained by democratic process in order for society to function.

> Court order, legislation.

That’s not what I meant. What would a break up for them look like? For instance AT&T was broken up into the baby bells.

> From an artificially constrained set of options

There is no other option for phones? Social media? Computers? Online commerce? And how is it “artificial”?

> Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens

So what is this “power”? How are they forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do?

There's a little book by James Williams titled Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy that I highly recommend. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/...> If you're not up for a whole book, however short, Ian Leslie's "The scientists who make apps addictive" is a great primer.<https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...>

And you still also haven’t come up with a reasonable way to “break up the BigTech”. If you ban the sale of apps with in game purchases that still doesn’t break up tech

Breaking up big tech is straightforward. You order Google to spin off the ads business, Amazon to split out AWS, Meta to split Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp into separate companies and so on.

Did you know Amazon owns its own freight airline, called Amazon Air? Here's a few other things that could be split: AbeBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads, Audible; IMDb, Zappos, Twitch, Curse, Inc., Whole Foods, Ring, Egghead Software, Digital Photography Review, all the companies Amazon acquired and put into Kindle while killing off competing products, MGM studios, and a few dozen others.

Lina Khan explains it all: Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox <https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...>

Amazons share of commerce is 37% and it’s share of commerce is even smaller.

OK now include all things Amazon owns: Amazon Air, AbeBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads, Audible; IMDb, Zappos, Twitch, Curse, Inc., Whole Foods, Ring, Egghead Software, Digital Photography Review, all the companies Amazon acquired and put into Kindle while killing off competing products, MGM studios

Then why not compare to big oil, big pharma, etc? The point is that both Big Tobacco and Meta sell dopamine addictions.

Microsoft Windows now has ads even inside the Solitaire game among many other places, Amazon is putting ads everywhere including their cardboard boxes ("House of the Dragon" et al), and when you serch something to buy there sometimes all you see above the fold are ads (related products but ads nonetheless), Netflix now has "ad-supported" plans for some countries, the article may be overstating the problem but you are understating it.

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