Europe, where the largest business is a luxury handbag company, has now essentially declared acquisitions illegal, and is eagerly regulating American tech companies after completely failing in developing their own tech sector.
It’s hardly a good thing that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. soak up so many businesses into their already vast portfolios.
What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies.
Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV.
Or Nest integrating with Google Home
Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo.
There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.
Apple headphones "just work" with Apple devices.
You can switch audio from your phone to your Apple TV with a single confirmation click. No need to unpair and then manually initiate a connection on your desired device.
I don't know how competition law enforcement is going to make Bluetooth work better?
But your solution would be to make Apple technology worse?
You will get problems if you buy no-name things from Amazon, but you always get problems when you buy anything no-name off of Amazon.
You will also get problems if you use Linux of course (even with good headphones), but that obviously goes without saying. Yes yes I am sure you can get Bluetooth to work reliably in Linux by just recompiling the kernel and change your alsa config to use jack to remap your output to yada yada yada... No thanks.
Some cheaper devices are more difficult (I have a super cheap bluetooth receiver for an old car where you need to turn on the BT on the phone before turning on the dongle) but nothing along the lines of "unpair, repair, unpair, repair".
The behavior of Apple devices interacting with non-Apple devices is an intentional design choice by Apple to NOT support seamless interoperability. That's very different from the underlying tech being inferior to Apple's proprietary solutions.
Huh what? At least the large brands have pretty much zero issues.
The exception is battery power indicators (AirPods don't show power level on Android phones, and JBL's PartyBox and Anker's SoundCore don't show power level on iOS/macOS devices), and for older wired headphones the behavior of the buttons may be weird depending on if they have been designed for Apple or for Android.
sound quality is potato level in calls, though.
That said there is a successor called LC3 [1], but hardware support for it has been lacking as it's a relatively fresh standard.
More, look at how non-integrated much of the big companies are. Sony used to amuse the heck out of me for how isolated all of their products were from each other. Microsoft, similarly, had some odd screwups in their own ecosystems. Often by trying to present it as if they had a set of APIs that would work on all of their offerings, but with hard to reason about restrictions based on what you were targeting. Amazon was similarly run as a series of different teams/companies that all happen to be under the same umbrella company name.
There is nothing preventing cross company integration but these companies themselves. That behavior should not be rewarded by customers or allowed by regulatory agencies.
Because those tech companies intentionally make it unnecessarily hard. Rather than creating an (open) standard they dig out an extra moat around their walled garden, and make it essentially impossible to release well-integrated products without paying the Apple/Google/Amazon Tax - if they even allow it at all.
Just compare it with a standard like Wifi or Displayport: it's orders of magnitude more complex than pushing some audio to a headphone, yet it works seamlessly across dozens of vendors. When was the last time you had to worry about your computer with a Windows Ethernet port not being compatible with a router providing Apple Ethernet?
Not that it hasn't been done before, but it's been a while. x_X
Until they don’t. Adding an Apple Watch to my iPhone means it no longer supports airdrop, and I can’t install apps to my iPhone via Xcode.
Reference? I admit I use Airdrop once every 5 years or so, but I've had a Watch for longer than that.
Nest… is that still a thing?
Ring-Alexa integration is good but not great.
Amazon Music the app integration with Alexa is… non-existent? I can’t play music on my phone and move it to an echo device. I’m now resorting to posting on HN and hoping that a product dev or PM notices.
A healthy market would see casual interop between these services, and they all started with that interop before slowly strangling it out and monetising through adverts, tracking, data mining, and exclusivity. Open protocols allow you to bypass that though, which is why each of these networks are locked down.
There's no reason why your Airpods should talk over a proprietary Apple protocol and your web apps only work 100% effectively on chrome browsers, having inferior functionality by design if you don't commit fully to the landlord of your walled garden of choice.
I was confused by this because most rankings say Volkswagen is the biggest company in Europe, but it looks like LVMH is currently #2 by market cap (behind Novo Nordisk, which I assume is flying high thanks to the semaglutide craze). Considering that #3 is ASML, I'm not sure this ranking especially supports your narrative.
That BioNTech is pretty cool too.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/973297/largest-european-...
In other words, capitalism.
I think they should be assumed harmful, and burden of proof should be on the acquirer to demonstrate public good.
Larger companies can get better deals from their suppliers. It can be a nice alternative to bankruptcy for a company which is unprofitable on its own. It would allow for integrations which would be all but impossible with separate companies.
Of course in practice it rarely works out like that. Megacorps usually do acquisitions to get rid of competition or to obtain technology. The smaller company is almost always completely gutted within a few years, to the detriment of their original customer base.
Or maybe not. But the point I'm making is that we don't have to solve the bad features of our economic system in ways that make things worse, just because that's how it's always been done.
Alexa in your vaccuum, duh.
If history is any guide, then there is negative public benefit in the vast majority of cases.
Mao, durring the cultural revolution thought the same thing. That villages could be doing all their own metal work. No one needs a major steel or iron works so break those up and let things be produced locally.
It backfired spectacularly.
There are things that can only be done at scale (steel). There are things that you can let have more linear growth as you scale (accounting), IT.
You get very interesting things when companies get very large. Bell labs, gave us unix (that ATT gave away cause it was a monopoly). Xerox gave us the modern GUI. ML foundations emerged out of google. The funding for 23 and me came from google founders and helped push squencing (capital into that market).
Innovation tends to come from taking smart people throwing piles of money at them, and letting them do their thing.
This was the realm of the aristocracy, then the university, then the government and now it's in the hands of private business. Everyone may hate on musk but rockets that land is progress that got made because he got stupidly rich and beat the incumbants.
If you want something different, you can have that. You can start your own company, run it in the style of Mondragon (cool corp go check them out) and claw your way to the top.
That's because they bombed themselves to smithereens twice within 30 years about a century ago.
If Facebook and Google have a duopoly on online ads, and businesses in India and Saudi Arabia and Russia and Europe who want to advertise online are sending money to America, and the companies are making lots of their American employees rich - that sounds like a good thing for America?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
But so long as the collusion has a greater negative effect for foreign businesses, and most of the money extracted from American businesses stays in America - that's more money for America.
Hypothetically. At least, this is what I assume American legislators are thinking when they ignore competition issues.
There's a current SCOTUS case about this exact question and it looks likely that it will be decided in favor of these companies to repatriate their revenue without paying a single penny in taxes. In other words: they racked up hundreds of billions in revenue and just held it overseas until they can claw it back without paying their fair share.
That lets you build a dataset of these numbers correlated with all the other things Amazon knows about you. Then target you for ads.
Maybe, it notices that your coffee table is smaller than average than other similar people/apartments. They also know you have previously bought dark colored fake wood furniture before. So they advertise dark colored coffee tables to you, in the price range you would be able to afford.
Even where they are public record, there are often limits. San Francisco limits you to six requests per day, costs $0.10 per page, and must be applied in person or via mail.
I mean, I assume the tax assessors don't take a photo of you taking a shit and put it on your property record card?
I see people complaining that Amazon stuffs their face with noname amazon brand clones of anything when they search for it.
So what the EU worries about is that you won't be able to find any other vacuum cleaner except Roomba on Amazon.
Also, I bet $20 Amazon would have laid off a sizable portion of the iRobot workforce anyway just like Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft.
This is exactly what was happening here, the business was being acquired. Now what I would assume is next is a slow death and then their tech being picked up for cheap after bankruptcy proceedings.
Generalized statements are dumb.
Looks like they still haven't figured out this)
Huh what? Biontech is a German company. The German Mittelstand literally runs half of the "hidden champions" worldwide - companies that everyone else depends on, that have utter dominance in their niche market. German cars are of a hardware build quality that makes anyone else - particularly Tesla - be dead in the water (although the software side of German cars is just the other way around, I'll admit that). Germany literally created the market for cheap solar panels by massively subsidizing them during the Schröder years. MP3? A standard developed by Fraunhofer in Germany. CERN and ITER? European based. Europe as a whole has an actually working high-speed train network. The maglev train? A German invention. Brutal and effective collective worker action (aka strikes)? A French patent. Chip-and-PIN? Introduced in Europe. A ton of ISO standards? They are actually extensions or adoption of German DIN, including the paper size that almost everyone but the US uses. Metric/SI system? An European invention. MySQL? A Swedish invention. Linux? Invented by a Finn. Half of mobile communications dates back to stuff from Nokia and Ericsson.
The only area where Europe lags behind is providing insane amounts of insanely dumb capital to startups.
Of course there are winners in all regions of the world. Most of your examples are pretty biased though. Japanese cars > German cars. China is probably more relevant to the massive cost reductions in solar panels. Europe has a high-speed train network because of its age and size. Not practical in many parts of the world but I would say China's network is much better than Europes. Maglev trains were not a German invention.
You are missing the bigger picture of my half serious side. I am not talking about specific inventions but that 1) making a generalize statement is pointless and just introduces useless strife and 2) the EU is starting to get eaten away by Chinese manufacturing and innovation. There is a balance between regulation and free markets and if I was wanting to HQ a company I am not sure I would pick the EU.
[1]https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/world-map-manufacturing-out...
They are far from perfect but ultimately better than push notification from ebay-like application after random googling some thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
Of the entire top-100, there are maaaybe 10 or 20 in a monopoly-like position, and that's mostly because they intentionally dug out a very specific niche.
Monopolies abound! /s
Amazon more than once hindered competitors on their marketplace
I wish US regulators would do better.