The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead.
If the government is net ahead after a decade or so, then we'd know.
This approach to antitrust wouldn't work in cases like the Apple case, where the power is worth it to the company only because they can misuse it, but it would be a very fair and accounting-transparent remedy for the "startup gets bought by competitor" case.
There is no need to bikeshed a new solution here. Antitrust law solves this just fine, as exemplified by this case.
We've got a lot of history on what happens when technology is acknowledged as a natural monopoly and guided through it's development, evolution, and dissemination through society for the global welfare: that's the entire 20th century friend: the transistor, the Internet, the laser, fucking Velcro.
We're living through a time when that treasure trove of public wealth (paid for by taxpayers) is getting captured up by a caricature of gilded age kleptocracy at the front row of the fucking Inaugeration.
We know what the outcomes are. I don't know why people who hang out on Hacker News are fighting the data on this tooth and nail. Maybe it's because Trump threw her out, maybe it's because they own a bunch of NVIDIA stock and like the status quo, I don't know.
The outcomes are not in fucking dispute in this case or the macro situation.
The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit. That’s because the bar for IPO has risen so high that only massive already incumbent unicorns can reach it. IPO isn’t a way to raise capital to compete. It’s a victory lap if you’ve won already.
Don’t know if this is actually true, that she was having this chilling effect. I am relaying a sentiment I’ve encountered.
Of course the other reason is tech-right echo chamber brain rot. People need to get off Xhitter. (Not a fan of doomer left anti tech brain rot either. There’s more than one kind of brain rot around.)
It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplification with about as much nuance.
Smart people get emotionally manipulated on every other kind of politics at the behest of the new oligarchs, why not this one?
I heard a Thiel interview recently where he ranted about Greta Thunberg and the antichrist and used a bunch of very online Xhitter bubble terms like referring to low efficacy as “low-T” and I was like this guy needs to touch grass. It didn’t even make a lot of sense.
Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say.
Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.
Thiel grew up in the 90s. Whatever one deems the tolerance situation today, it was worse then.
Isn’t that the sane thing we (rightfully) criticized Apple, Google, Adobe and a few other companies for doing in the Jobs era when they had an anti poaching agreement?
What do you mean "now"? That's a major part of what it means to regulate acquisitions. So yes they should continue to regulate this extremely narrow slice of hiring.
> Isn’t that the same thing
Only if we oversimplify the scenario all the way down to "hiring".
And if we do that, there's thousands of laws that prevent hiring people in all sorts of situations.
What laws keep companies from hiring people they want to hire who are legally allowed to work in the country?
This is exactly what Google did, it hired employees.
Who exactly does that benefit? Not the employees. Maybe the investors? Do you really want the government to restrict who can be hired from a company or better yet, whether employees can accept better offers from another company? That’s only the other side of the coin of restricting employee movement based on non competes.
There's a neighboring comment that used almost the exact same wording that I already replied to.
In short: No.
> What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?
Is your startup like 10 people? Worth much less than a billion dollars? Then it's not big enough to be a problem.
But if it's the entire team, and that team is the backbone of a company, and acquiring that company would be blocked by the government, all three of those things, then your income is already being suppressed by not allowing acquisitions. Sorry about that, but the extra boost you'd get during monopoly forming would only be temporary anyway. In the long term it's better for both employees and customers to avoid too much consolidation. Extending that rule to stop team buyouts will have almost no effect on the status quo. It's allowing the team buyouts that could potentially change the status quo, and it would be a change for the worse.
So exactly how does a Google “monopoly” (which definitely doesn’t exist in AI if anywhere), harm customers? And would I as a potential employee better off or worse off?
Am I paying more for search today because of the monopoly? Am I paying more for any of the free stuff that Google has because of advertising (that I block anyway)?
In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?
Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?
I'm not going to try to give you the exact line.
> In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?
> Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?
That's way too general. You could use that same argument to say acquisitions should never be blocked.
You don’t see what kind of Kafkaesque mess these proposed laws are creating?
Who are we benefiting again?
And these rules would very rarely come into effect.
I'm not here to defend the entire edifice of the FTC having control over acquisitions. I'm here to say that when they have that control, it should also include almost-but-not-quite-acquisitions.
You specifically said that in some cases if a company hired employees it should then be prevented from licensing the technology
And still haven’t given a good reason why it shouldn’t.
The “bad” acquisition is usually considered Instagram . But who cares if a toxic social media site acquires another one? Who was harmed?
You keep making examples that are less clear-cut, but whatever I agree there are things a company can do that aren't effectively acquisitions. I'm not saying how to write the rule, I'm just saying google is on the wrong side.
> You are specifically saying that a company shouldn’t be allowed to license IP, shouldn’t be allowed to acquire the company and shouldn’t be allowed to hire the employees or some combination.
They're totally allowed to acquire the company... as long as the FTC doesn't say no. And they can do lots of those other things too.
I don't know how you got the impression that I think acquisitions should be blocked more than a fraction of a percent of the time.
Even further, google SHOULD have acquired the company instead of doing what they did.
Google had no fiduciary duty to do what’s in the best interest of WindSurf’s investors.
Google had every right to give the WindSurf employees offers to leave. The employees had every right to accept the offers. There is no world where the government should have been involved in that part.
At that point, the Windsurf equity owners had two choices - either not license or license.
Which part should have been illegal? The FTC could have said “Google you can’t both get the employees and license the IP”. Google would have said “fine, we will just hire the talent and have them create something similar”. Windsurf would have been worse off.
Alternatively, Google could license the technology. Then the employees could say I would rather just work for Google. Would you then be okay with enforcing non competes even though they are currently illegal in California?
There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.
We actually saw something like that happen between Microsoft and OpenAI during the Altman fiasco. Microsoft had already licensed the technology and Altman was going to go to Microsoft and take OpenAI’s best people with him. Should the government have stepped in then and told Microsoft they can’t hire OpenAI employees?
Ridiculous. They intervene so rarely, even at the peak.
> Which part should have been illegal?
Not my problem to solve. Ever heard of "structuring" though? It's not unsolvable.
> There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.
If doing an actual acquisition would have been allowed, that would have been better for them.
If it wouldn't have been allowed, then yes the hypothetical law is worse for them but it's an acceptable loss. Sorry you can't use a workaround to get the benefit of an illegal deal.
1. Google to hire the employees and force the employees to stay at the company and how?
2. Google to be able to hire the employees and then Windsurf not be allowed to license their IP to a company who is willing to give them a bunch of money?
The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.
What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?
Or in Figma/Adobe’s case. What if Adobe just said, Forget it, we will pay all of the developers we want a shit ton of money (less than $20 billion) to rebuild the entire application from scratch and leave the auxiliary staff behind. Would you also outlaw that?
In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?
Perhaps telling Google they can do one or the other but not both. Or not both unless they want to treat it like an acquisition.
Again I'm taking it as a given that it's fine to restrict company actions. If you dislike that entire concept then take it up with the people that put FTC in charge of acquisitions, not me. Not every willing transaction should be legal.
> The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.
Only if they allow this to succeed. If they slap it down then no company will attempt it again. They'll just file for acquisition.
> What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?
I refuse. You're asking an unreasonable amount of detail from me.
> Figma/Adobe’s case
If they want to make individual job offers and not try to negotiate group things or talk to figma at all then they can go ahead and try.
I'd be surprised if they didn't already do that.
> In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?
Even with the risk of corruption I prefer regulating acquisitions to allowing everything.
It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity" in a company: a much fuzzier area with much less clear established stare decis: companies very rarely litigate such cases, it's an area that has historically been kept out of the courts for the most part because for the most part it has been in everyone's interests to keep the wheels greased on this (you'll notice old school VCs like Khosla are against fucking around in it in public forums).
Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal. At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".
If the trend becomes to just dissolve a startup the minute its worth anything and immediately partition it into exactly the pieces a giant company wants and zero out everyone else, this will have a massively destabilizing effect on a historical engine of innovation (see: OGs are against it on Twitter).
And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.
Stop talking about the government restricting hiring, no one said that.
> It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity"
An employer has never had “property rights” to decide where I can and can’t work.
> Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal
The CEO while working for the company has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. But doesn’t have the responsibility not to leave if another company offers it more money or if other employees that like the CEO, they are free to reach out to the CEO and leave too.
> At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".
“Equity” in startups have always statistically been fools gold between dilution, preferred shares, etc.
> But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something"*
See previous comments about only the naive or true believers (but I repeat myself they are one in the same) are naive enough to believe in anything promised or implied by startups more than you will get paid X amount in cash for hours you work (and sometimes not even that).
> And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.
So the solution is for the government to pass more laws to fix the problems that the regulations it already put in place caused?
No one has proposed that anyone be barred from taking an offer of employment (that I've seen and interpreted that way anyways), that would be extremely unpopular with just about everyone.
What people are talking about is whether or not founders and VCs can de facto sell a company in terms of the real assets that people care about without distributing the proceeds to shareholders via a legal fiction that the one company disappeared (was written down or otherwise disposed of) and tada over here some job offers and other compensation appeared in just that amount but for a different group of people.
This is a plot device in the Sorkin film about Facebook. They're in Thiel's office getting the new investment and the numbers guy is like "we're going to get you clean paperwork in Delaware" and Thiel looks up: "So who, exactly, is Eduardo Saverin?" I very much doubt the movie was a terribly accurate portrayal, but that's the TLDR for lay people: one company vanishes, another appears with the same assets, but different ownership.
Trying to make this about the federal government telling people they can't work for Google is bad faith. Stop with that shit.
The founders are making the choice that their equity in the company is worth less (not worthless) than the offer they are getting from their new employee.
For the fucking hard of thinking: it would not be about an injunction against the founders being able to work at Google. It would be about them owing money to former employees.
Enough with this, it's trolling at this point.
I get an offer from Google where I am now making real money and have liquid RSUs coming. You think other employees should have the right to sue me because I left the company for a better offer?
The investors aren’t getting anything, in this case Google didn’t acquire the company, they hired the employees. Why would the investors be sued because employees left?
That is not the only form of regulation, and not the form that would be applied here. This would be after the fact, going after companies that try to pull things like this.
In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.
These were regular old job offers. At any time, any of the employees could have stayed at Windsurf instead of taking a lot more money from Google.
Google didn’t want the “assets”. Google wanted the people. Even then they only wanted the best people.
They were not.
> Google didn’t want the “assets”.
They paid 2.4 billion in licensing fees. Or something like that, looks like part of that was special structured not a regular old job offer money.
Is there any proof of this at all?
Or you could run the business profitably and not exit at all.
So as usual here we are with the epic showdown of Data and Vibes...and in an obvious landslide Vibes takes it home.
Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not. Khan just needs a poster child for her overall intervention philosophy.
Pointing at Figma as a success for her overall world view is like the religious who say “oh god saved me from that flood” while ignoring the hundreds who did die. The Almighty wanted them to die? Or…?
If you’re gonna claim the successes you have to claim the failures
Someone caught a shooting star in the palm of their hand one time and this happened.
What are you talking about?
I think it matters. Look what happened when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. The innovative product (Fireworks) that brought many (but not all) many of the innovations that would later come in Sketch and then Figma was left to slowly die because it competed with their flagship product (Photoshop). That delayed innovation in that market segment by around a decade.
Let’s not forget our beloved Flash, who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.
I almost never see anyone mention Macromedia in relation to Flash these days, almost as if history has rewritten it to an Adobe thing.
Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually.
The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its execution model was.
From a developer perspective, I'm still sad that it went away. The old COM/OLE/ActiveX ecosystem was flexible to a degree nothing has never ever been since.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-sta...
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how...
Amazon
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...
Microsoft and Inflection
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-ai-reverse-acqui-hire-150...
Microsoft almost pulled it off with OpenAI during the Altman fiasco.
But blaming Lina Khan for the crime orgy that started the minute she was forced out is silly.
Go stick that blade where it belongs. I'll help any way I can.
The only reason they took this route instead of an acquisition is because of the current regulator environment.
But the current VP was a huge fan of Khan.
that looks strange to me to say the least - a company A's leadership leases completely away the company A's IP to a company B while at the same time getting fat employment offers from the same company B. If it were in Russia i'd say it is a bribe/kickback while in US it looks suspiciously like a huge conflict of interests. How no regulatory agency looked into that...
There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.
actually they have such a responsibility - if the offer in any way connected (or may be perceived as such) with a deal in which the employee is representing its current employer. The same reason why the President can't take expensive gifts from foreign powers for example ...
>There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.
that has no relation to the current discussion.
The contract states you can’t solicit employees under that arrangement. But either side’s employees are free to proactively outreach.
I’m not referring to “consulting companies” that are basically doing staff augmentation.
Neither is the case here
This mafia capitalism isn't even good for the capitalists! They just can't get it together on a sustainable system!
1. Someone from a wealthy / connected family
2. Someone who scrambled to the top of 100,000 other people
Folks can argue good schools, etc. all they want, but proven ability and drive to outcompete others should be a heavy counter argument against nepotism of all sorts.
In my latter years of my career, I’ve been offered “great opportunities” at a startup that paid less in cash for more responsibilities than I was making as a mid level employee (cash + RSUs) at BigTech when I was there.
Of course they promised “equity” that was illiquid and probably would have been worthless.
I thought they were dumping everyone at the moment. Unless you’re an AI researcher.
That means if there are 10 developer - 7 working on the product and 3 working on the fundamental AI problem, those 7 aren’t going to be left (the company didn’t want the product anyway) and the 3 researchers are going to be hired.
Something similar happened with Google and Windsurf. So who benefited from the anti acquisition mood of the previous FTC? Not most of the employees who could have made more just working for a public company in the first place and not even the investors.
Google accomplished the same thing with less red tape and didn’t have to hire the people they didn’t want.
If this was a viable strategy then they would have just done it regardless, right?
Meanwhile the solution to that is to break up the monopolies to begin with. You don't have trillion dollar companies monopolizing the labor pool if you don't have trillion dollar companies.
Monopolies screw them on both ends. Customers pay more because there are fewer suppliers, and then employees make less because there is less competition for hiring which also makes it easier for the large employers to coordinate non-poaching agreements.
The fact that Google did “poach” employees means that there wasn’t an agreement not to.
Or in Google’s case the infrastructure to design custom processors with the demand to actually buy enough slots from TSMC to make it affordable?
You can’t make laws to undue scale efficiencies. A startup isn’t going to make a phone in their garage to compete with Apple no matter what magically thinking they have about the government passing laws.
Most startups can’t even pay the wages of a mid level employee at BigTech company that has been out of school for three years.
Just like any other industry, if a startup can’t afford the free market price of labor, that’s a them problem.
In a competitive market you don't have that. Instead of a massive conglomerate having a warehouse in every region, Alice, Bob and Carol each have a warehouse near New York, Dan, Erin and Frank have one near Houston, etc., and then a dozen independent aggregators each negotiate with a warehouse in each region to store goods for anyone who wants to offer fast delivery everywhere.
Meanwhile doing that, whether you're Amazon or not, is inefficient for anything that doesn't need to be delivered on short notice. If you have a recurring subscription to get a box of toiletries every month, it doesn't matter if it arrives on the 17th because they mailed it from a local warehouse on the 16th or a centralized warehouse on the 10th, and delivery companies offer discounts if you palletize shipments based on region even if they come from a central location, which removes the cost of having local warehouses for those regions.
> Or in Google’s case the infrastructure to design custom processors with the demand to actually buy enough slots from TSMC to make it affordable?
If there is aggregate demand for those processors then you sell them to the other people who want them regardless of whether they're within the same corporation, and then they don't have to be.
> You can’t make laws to undue scale efficiencies. A startup isn’t going to make a phone in their garage to compete with Apple no matter what magically thinking they have about the government passing laws.
The defect is in expecting one entity to make the entire phone.
One company makes a screen, one makes a battery, one designs a processor, another fabs it, another makes memory, another makes the OS (or it's open source), another lays out the system board to integrate the various components, another does final assembly, etc.
When you don't require the whole thing to be done under the same umbrella it doesn't take a trillion dollar company to do any given piece.
> Most startups can’t even pay the wages of a mid level employee at BigTech company that has been out of school for three years.
Suppose phone components were easily available as a fungible commodity, and had standardized interfaces so that integrating them was only a modest amount of work, i.e. a year of effort for a full-time engineer. Then you get a phone which sells as an also-ran -- a million units a year for three years, less than 0.5% of Apple's sales volume. The phone sells for $250, less than the cheapest new iPhone, and 0.5% of the retail price goes to pay the engineer.
Then they'd be making $3.75M for that year of work. Those numbers could be off by 10 fold and still be a competitive salary.
Except that the market is too concentrated and the standards don't exist, which means it's not that easy as things are now.
> Just like any other industry, if a startup can’t afford the free market price of labor, that’s a them problem.
The issue is, is it a free market, or a captured one?
If I want a regionally redundant infrastructure do I now have to negotiate with multiple companies in a region (multi AZ) and multiple regions? Do I have to negotiate with thousands of Points of preference for my CDN?
Do all of these companies who want their own TPUs have to negotiate with TSMC?
None of that is true and the impression only comes about because concentrated markets create a small sample size and Microsoft and Google in particular care less about user experience than Apple.
Putting aside things like third party support (which come from incumbency and scale rather than design choices), which desktop operating system has the best user experience: Windows, macOS, or Linux? It's Linux by a hair, then macOS, with Windows a mile behind either of them. Which doesn't make any sense if vertical integration is a huge advantage, but makes perfect sense if specifically Microsoft sucks and being insulated from real competition allows them to.
"Each company has to make a margin" doesn't increase costs whatsoever because each company only gets the margin on the part they're doing. If the RAM has a net production cost of $20 and the flash is $25 and they're both made by the same company with a 10% margin then the total cost is $45 + 10%. If they're made by two different companies then one costs $20 + 10%, the other costs $25 + 10% and the total is still $45 + 10%.
And the same is true for steps that happen in series rather than in parallel, because margins aren't a fixed percentage, they're the amount you can get away with before the customer goes to a competitor, which in a competitive market is related to the cost of production + cost of capital. Having a combined retailer and wholesaler means the combined entity then has combined costs -- the "retailer" has to negotiate with manufacturers and the "wholesaler" has to operate retail stores, and therefore needs both margins to operate.
Meanwhile market consolidation is the thing that actually increases prices, because the lack of competition is what allows the supplier to increase their margins without losing business to competitors.
> If I want a regionally redundant infrastructure do I now have to negotiate with multiple companies in a region (multi AZ) and multiple regions? Do I have to negotiate with thousands of Points of preference for my CDN?
If you want a cart full of groceries, do you have to negotiate with hundreds of orange groves and chicken farms? No, supermarkets do that and then you go to any of the numerous supermarkets to get your groceries. That doesn't require the supermarkets to own the orange groves or chicken farms.
> Do all of these companies who want their own TPUs have to negotiate with TSMC?
Do all of the companies that want their own GPUs have to negotiate with TSMC? No, AMD/nVidia/Broadcom/NeoMagic/Qualcomm/etc. negotiates with TSMC/Samsung/GlobalFoundries/Intel/etc. and then you buy a GPU from a GPU company instead of the GPU/TPU customer needing to design their own GPU/TPU.
Let’s look at the set top box market and integrated smart TV OS. There is Roku, Amazon, Samsung and LG off the top of my head. All of them suck compared to the AppleTV and use cheaper hardware.
Android OEMs have been customizing Android for years and they are all worse than either Apple or even stock Android.
In the PC market which was commoditized like you want, have you seen the crap the OEMs do to their computers when left to their own devices?
> Putting aside things like third party support..
“Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
> It's Linux by a hair, then macOS, with Windows a mile behind either of them.
Did I somehow miss “the year of Linux on the desktop”?
User experience means for me - long battery life, runs cool, app availability, integrates well with my other devices, runs quietly.
> doesn't increase costs whatsoever because each company only gets the margin on the part they're doing. If the RAM has a net production cost of $20 and the flash is $25 and they're both made by the same company with a 10% margin then the total cost is $45 + 10%. If they're made by two different companies then one costs $20 + 10%, the other costs $25 + 10% and the total is still $45 + 10%.
That makes absolutely no sense mathematically.
> If you want a cart full of groceries, do you have to negotiate with hundreds of orange groves and chicken farms? No, supermarkets do that and then you go to any of the numerous supermarkets to get your groceries. That doesn't require the supermarkets to own the orange groves or chicken farms.
So you suggest I go through a middle man with their own markup?
Right now, I can with one text file of yaml or one CDK app create a globally redundant infrastructure with databases, VMs, queues, load balancers, a CDN, network infrastructure a cloud hosted call center (one of my specialties), storage (S3) and access 6-7 LLM’s all running on one set of infrastructure along with fast interconnects owned by one company.
And when I have a problem, I talk to one organization. Are you suggesting I should go through a third party now to do all of that? What do I gain?
> Do all of the companies that want their own GPUs have to negotiate with TSMC? No, AMD/nVidia/Broadcom/NeoMagic/Qualcomm/etc. negotiates with TSMC/Samsung/GlobalFoundries/Intel/etc. and then you buy a GPU from a GPU company instead of the GPU/TPU customer needing to design their own GPU/TPU.
And out of all those companies, who have top of the line mobile chips or desktop chips that are designed in conjunction with their hardware and have a good experience?
If you like commoditized phones and computers where dozens of manufacturers can choose what to pick up off the shelf, you are welcomed to buy a PC or Android device. Apple is in no shape form or fashion a monopoly in the mobile space or desktop space.
AWS is not a monopoly in cloud computing and devoutly doesn’t stop someone from using a Colo.
None of these big tech companies are hard to avoid.
It is fairly easy with around a quarter million of capital to start your own phone hardware business, fly to China and negotiate with ODMs (not a typo) and they will customize a run for you where you choose from one of their “platforms” and run your own version of AOSP.
> Android OEMs have been customizing Android for years and they are all worse than either Apple or even stock Android
The thing you're objecting to here is the anti-competitive behavior. If the software it comes with is worse than stock Android then people should be replacing it with stock Android, or a community Android fork which is even better. Except that they're prevented from doing this by the OEM or Google, which is the anti-competitive thing that should be prohibited.
And isn't the hardware being cheaper the advantage? They're all fully capable of playing the video, so why would you want the device to cost more than necessary to perform its function?
> In the PC market which was commoditized like you want, have you seen the crap the OEMs do to their computers when left to their own devices?
The PC market has both OEMs that install crapware and those that don't. But they get paid to install crapware, which allows them to charge slightly less, and then because it's not a locked platform, you can remove it. Which means it can be to your advantage to take the discount and then remove the crapware rather than paying more, which makes that option popular. The option to pay slightly more for one that comes without it is also available.
That's the benefit of competition. You get to choose what you want.
> “Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
Third party support comes from market share, which yields a massive incumbency advantage. The #1 and #2 desktop operating systems are both from companies founded in the 1970s.
Meanwhile Linux desktop market share is up to 5% this month, +40% YoY: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...
And unlike the long-term trend of that coming at the expense of Windows, this year it came at the expense of Apple.
Because the user experience is actually good and the market share is getting high enough that the third party support is getting better.
> User experience means for me - long battery life, runs cool, app availability, integrates well with my other devices, runs quietly.
Battery life, runs cool and runs quietly are all related hardware design trade offs. To make that happen you either need a low-power processor (low-performance or you need the latest fabrication process to get high performance at low power which is high-cost), or you need a big battery and heatsink to make a high-power processor quiet with long battery life, which adds weight.
None of that has anything to do with vertical integration. Apple is taking the trade-off in favor of high cost, but a competitive market gives you every one of those options and lets you choose. It also has Apple Silicon as a separate company whose chips are available in any device that wants to pay for them.
And "integrates well with my other devices" is the thing where you want open standards. Nobody has any trouble with Safari or Chrome "integrating" with nginx or apache even though they're made by independent entities. The problem only comes when some unrepentant oligopoly is trying to lock you into a specific ecosystem while you're trying to use devices from a different one, which is the thing that ought to get them in hot water.
> That makes absolutely no sense mathematically.
Are you actually disputing that ($20 x 1.10) + ($25 x 1.10) is the same total as ($20 + $25) x 1.10?
> So you suggest I go through a middle man with their own markup?
I feel like you're misunderstanding how markups work in a competitive market.
If a company is doing nothing of value and yet has no monopoly on anything, nobody patronizes them.
An aggregator is doing something of value. It's doing something that a vertically-integrated monopoly would be doing internally, but doing it as a separate entity. If that thing is made reasonably easy to do then lots of competitors offer aggregation services which keeps their margins thin because the customer will choose the one offering a reasonable level of service at the most competitive price.
Which makes the margin they can add less than the one the monopolist would, because unlike the monopolist, the company operating in a more competitive market can easily lose your business to a competitor if they try to charge more.
> And when I have a problem, I talk to one organization.
If you don't like the oranges you got from the supermarket then you talk to the supermarket rather than the orange grove. That still doesn't require them to be the same entity.
> Are you suggesting I should go through a third party now to do all of that? What do I gain?
You get a more competitive market and in turn more options and lower prices. If Google Cloud has TPUs and Amazon S3 has cheaper object storage then the aggregator offers you both from a single source and prevents you from getting locked into a single cloud. Meanwhile the aggregator itself has competitors which require them to keep their own margins thin.
> And out of all those companies, who have top of the line mobile chips or desktop chips that are designed in conjunction with their hardware and have a good experience?
The state of the market is poor because they're allowed to keep buying each other. New chip companies are formed that start to offer the things customers want and then Qualcomm or Broadcom buys them up. Apple is allowed to buy out all of TSMC's leading-edge fab capacity.
> If you like commoditized phones and computers where dozens of manufacturers can choose what to pick up off the shelf, you are welcomed to buy a PC or Android device.
Android isn't a real competitive market. It's captured by Google and has limited competition on the hardware side. In particular, the ability to run stock Android with a vanilla Linux kernel on a competitive phone is quite lacking.
> AWS is not a monopoly in cloud computing and devoutly doesn’t stop someone from using a Colo.
AWS is not a monopoly, but who was claiming that they were to begin with? They do some unsatisfying things to lock you into their platform if you make use of them, but computing infrastructure is a fairly competitive market in general.
It's iOS and Android that are the trouble.
> None of these big tech companies are hard to avoid.
What practical phone can I use that avoids both Google and Apple?
Even less than that, show me even a mid-range Android phone that can run the vanilla Linux kernel with in-tree drivers.
So it’s anticompetitive when one company controls the whole stack and it’s anticompetitive when dozens of companies get parts from different parts makers (just as you suggested) and compete by differentiating?
They still run Google Play Services (outside of China).
> An aggregator is doing something of value. It's doing something that a vertically-integrated monopoly would be doing internally, but doing it as a separate entity. If that thing is made reasonably easy to do then lots of competitors offer aggregation services which keeps their margins thin because the customer will choose the one offering a reasonable level of service at the most competitive price.
And is that aggregator going to pay to lay their own internet connection worldwide? Are they going to have multi AZ storage that is redundant across 3 available zones? Are they going to integrate thousands of POPs to create a CDN?
And tell me again how are any of the cloud providers monopolies when the CEO of AWS said that only 10% of all IT spend is spent on all three cloud providers combined?
> If Google Cloud has TPUs and Amazon S3 has cheaper object storage then the aggregator offers you both from a single source and prevents you from getting locked into a single cloud
You have no idea how much trouble multi cloud is at scale do you? (Hint: I use to work at AWS ProServe doing large implementation and now I do it at a third party company). Have you thought about that whole issue of having your data on one provider and your processing on another provider instead of having them both in the same data center? That whole network latency is going to kill you. Not to mention compliance, security, etc.
You’re always “locked into your infrastructure at scale. I’ve seen it take years to move a large implementation thst was nothing but a bunch of VMs.
> Apple is allowed to buy out all of TSMC's leading-edge fab capacity.
So that’s why Intel is so far behind because of Apple? That’s why AMD had to give up manufacturing their own hardware? Nvidia has been dual sourcing between Samsung and TSMC for years and Tesla just announced they are using Samsung for manufacturing chips in the US. Not to mention there is still Global Foundaries.
> Android isn't a real competitive market. It's captured by Google and has limited competition on the hardware side. In particular, the ability to run stock Android with a vanilla Linux kernel on a competitive phone is quite lacking.
Tell that to all of the manufactures in China. HN is full of people who run De-Google’s Android. There are hundreds of Android manufacturers and the Google Pixel doesn’t exactly have a high market share.
> What practical phone can I use that avoids both Google and Apple? Even less than that, show me even a mid-range Android phone that can run the vanilla Linux kernel with in-tree drivers.
Ask all of the people on HN that run alternate de-Googled Android phones and the billions of people in China.
You yourself can fly over to China and work with ODMs and do a run of phones that they will both your own AOSP customization. I mean you may not be able to but a decently capitalized investor can. This is what some of those point of sales customized tablets do.
I use to work in field services where large companies did this.
> Meanwhile Linux desktop market share is up to 5% this month, +40% YoY:
You sound like every startup founder: “we increased our market share by 100% over the past year from .01% of the market to .02% of the market.
We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.
You need some rules to price major externalities. Not minor externalities, because regulatory overhead and enforcement are themselves externalities and it doesn't do any good to burn $1 in overhead to prevent $0.90 in some other cost. But you want a ban on leaded gasoline.
And you need antitrust rules, because "the market is more efficient" is fundamentally predicated on competitive markets. Real competition is the sine qua non of that actually working. Most government inefficiency is because the government is a monopoly, and private monopolies are just as bad.
The problem is politics breaks everyone's brains. One party says "regulation good" and the other side says "regulation bad" before either of them considers what the regulation actually does. And then you have one party promoting illiterate nonsense like price controls or justifying busybodies who want to micromanage things they don't even understand or trusting the government with mass surveillance data just because they're not a private company, and on the other side you have people with no objections to tying arrangements or companies with double-digit market share buying even more of their competitors.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler." That last bit turns out to be kind of important.
Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient. Take the worst DMV office in the world and put it in charge of something way more important than license plates.
It's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. You can't vote out a monopolist, but unless there is a law against competing with them, there is a threshold for how bad they can get before somebody actually does. The problem is that threshold can be way past the point of anywhere you want to be.
Whereas governments can get even worse because if you resist their unreasonableness they declare you a criminal and resort to violence and you can't go to the police because they are the police. Voting can mitigate this, but there are governments without democracy, democratic governments that are structurally insulated from accountability in practice (see US incumbency rate and Congress abdicating its role to unelected regulatory bureaucrats), and even in a pure direct democracy you still have two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
What you want is neither of these things.
Ah, but that is why the monopoly uses its considerable resources to lobby passing laws that at least make it more difficult for someone to compete with them.
No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc). A media environment that reports on outliers for clicks and corporations that want to dump industrial waste in rivers.
95% of regulations and 95% of companies work so fantastically that nobody realizes they exist. Sure.
But re: regulation, that 5% tends to be in the really really important stuff.
How’s housing…and healthcare… and higher education…and the national debt…in the US going?
All of those things make up vastly more than 5% of the economy and are arguably all broken in the US because of poorly designed regulation.
I think assuming most regulation is “good” is an extremely dangerous proposition given regulation is extremely difficult to change or overturn once in place.
It’s important to also remember every regulation requires enforcement at gunpoint. You cannot choose to not follow them.
This is quite false. There are a few regulations that have a high cost/benefit ratio (e.g. ban leaded gasoline), and a few that are completely upside down (e.g. DMCA 1201), and then there are the vast majority which are the regulatory bureaucrat equivalent of busy work and are neutral at best. Positions exist to make new regulations, so they make new regulations.
But each new one has overhead, and then we get cost disease and high cost of living and increased market consolidation because regulatory compliance is a fixed cost that large corporations can bear more easily than smaller companies, and the complexity is used to disguise corruption. All of that is legitimately bad.
90% of them are completely worthless, and it's a significant problem that we have an apparatus structured to perpetually accumulate new ones without ever going back and cleaning house to remove the ones that can't be justified.
I think you mean to say that it had a very low cost/benefit. Otherwise, citation seriously needed.
These are people who are ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention? How can such an extreme position even begin to make sense? This is like letting boxers (or MMA fighters) fight in the ring without a referee, isn't it? As it is, there are lax rules that are getting even more relaxed by the day and even those lax rules aren't enforced consistently, for big businesses and those with money.
There are obviously the people in this cohort and there are also the people who think they will be in this cohort, who think they will be the victors in a cartel-like world.
Heck, before layoffs and the threat of AI started concentrating even more power into tech leadership there were plenty of tech folks along for the ride as the high paid, in demand workforce benefiting from the above.
[1] https://margins.app/america-and-americans-and-select/w/f395d...
It's that she was incredibly ineffective.
Of course she was right. That's what made her practical ineffectiveness so problematic.
She was often 100% right on what should be done but could only achieve 0-10% of it.
I'd rather have someone who is 70% right on what should be done, but can achieve almost all of it, as some previous FTC chairs were.
The argument that she had the correct agenda, won a few, lost most to a captured judiciary (correct me if I'm mis-characterizing your position) is probably the stupidest thing I've seen on one of the dumbest threads in recent memory.
Can you clarify where I've lost the plot with your argument and restore some of my sorely tested faith in humanity?
This is clearly a valuable game! It is worth in expectation $20B. But it also has a 50% chance of being worthless to you.
Someone offers to buy it from you for $20B. You agree, giving up some upside for some downside protection.
But then someone else says that's not allowed. So you play the game and you roll a six and get $60B.
Does that prove the person who made you play it rather than sell it was "right," ex ante?
Whether the government saw Adobe's willingness to overpay for Figma as a signal of Adobe's underlying incentives (as in "I acquire Figma to keep my monopoly" and not "I acquire Figma to vertically integrate and make better product for consumer") seems much harder to speculate on. I didn't explain (nor do I think there's an obvious explanation) for why the original deal was at the high price rather than the low price, but I'd imagine Figma would've been generally willing to sell for less than the price Adobe bid given Adobe was probably Figma's best customer for acquiry.
Someone made a good analogy on twitter that Khan essentially cut off a genius pianist's right hand, the pianist persevered and somehow succeeded in retaining their talent in spite of having one hand, and now Khan is taking credit for the feat. In the same way, the fact that Figma still exists is not proof that she was right.
None of the FTC's business
> If you care about employee comp? She was right.
None of the FTC's business
> Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right.
None of the FTC's business x3
> If you care about consumer choice, she was right.
Ok, so this is the FTC's business. But does Figma compete with Adobe in any major areas? I'm not aware of any major Adobe products like that.
> None of the FTC's business x3
> > If you care about consumer choice, she was right.
> Ok, so this is the FTC's business.
You don't think there's relationship between consumer choice and a large number of acquirers? These are basically equivalent statements, they're both saying "markets remain competitive".
And, no, they aren't remotely equivalent statements to each other or to "markets remain competitive." If there are 100 products in a market, and an acquisition reduces that to 99, it will have no effect on the competitiveness of a market, which is why such an acquisition is not typically any of the FTC's business.
Which is all to say that the market remains competitive.
If you don't think it's the FTC's business to decide whether or not that 100 to 99 move is significant, then I don't think you understand. Even if it's insignificant - it's their business to make that call. You can disagree with it, but if you think that isn't their balliwick, you're simply mistaken.
Adobe and Figma are competitors, right now, regardless of whether they have product lines in direct competition, at this moment.
I think it might be an alt for Peter Thiel himself! We're in the presence of greatness friend, we should just lean back and be enlightened.
Blocking the merger was good. But I'm not convinced the IPO was good. I think trying to be a company that's worth tens of billions of dollars is only going to make Figma worse. I care about the users more than the people that got rich.
Small float, big hype, litterally designed to pump the stock on the float.
1.2bn was raised - of which only 0.8bn was cashing out existing shareholders - all the other investors got the pump as planned all for the low price of $1.6bn.
Basically the existing shareholders got watered down by ~5% and the value of the shares they still hold are 3x and now liquid, better than they got in any of the vc funding rounds.
Chairwoman Born was right about everything (natch) and we got a modest crisis to prove that almost immediately afterwards with the Russian sovereign debt default and a society-changing crisis in 2008 (same OTC derivatives contracts right down to the flawed VAR methodology).
If we had let Ms. Born do her job as she was so clearly and eminemtly equipped and prepared to do it, you get an alternate history. We're probably sitting here on twenty years of budget surplus, carbon goals getting lined up and knocked down like clockwork, a well-run Internet living up to its potential, and two generations coming of age in Boomer-style optimism and prosperity instead of cynical hopelessness. There's probably no fentanyl crisis to speak of and Putin gets a nervous palsy just thinking about displeasung NATO.
God knows what the price will be this time.
Adobe killed their Figma competitor (XD), so the reality of the UI design tools niche in the design tools market is that Figma actually has a near monopoly. Sketch still chugs along, but its market share is negligible. Penpot is a neat idealistic community effort that is lightyears behind.
This is one of the reasons why Figma continues to tighten the screws on their userbase, who doesn't like it one bit, but continues to pay.
Now, this is all not to say, that it would've been any better with Adobe's involvement, more like lamenting the fact that Figma lived long enough to become a villain.
Monopolies aren't illegal. Preventing competition is the thing we want to stop. As far as I can see, Figma doesn't do anything to give themselves an unfair advantage or prevent other players from entering the market.
Fairness doesn’t mean everyone gets funded regardless of their quality.
This is not obvious at all to me. Instagram (bought for $1B) is probably worth ~700 B of Meta's market cap.
The consortium creates an oligopoly which prevents mutually beneficial deals that would have otherwise taken place in a regulated competitive free market between consumers and producers.
Maybe it's not a great choice of words to say here "the large company regulates the space" but it's definitely a problem worth pointing out.
Cartels form and collude, the JP Morgans or Goulds of the world see excessive competition next to their neat steel or railroad trusts and decide to organize it. And sometimes this can even be an improvement (those old telephone poles with like 90 separate junctions just got too tall to be safe!)
But on average, the public would like (or should want) a say in how markets are organized, because it is both possible and lucrative to induce market failure. Big Tech is especially good at this (its arguably far more their speciality than technology is).
Markets are inevitable (try to stop them forming if you don't believe me), but market failures are generally not inevitable, they are generally the result of poorly refereed markets.
Well, yes. But that does seem to gloss over the important part which is how they do it - hiring lobbyists and influencing the official regulators. If the frame is that someone is going to be the most powerful force in the market then sure, but the government setting it to be a particular body by fiat just creates a ripe target for corruption.
The history of the tech industry has been one of where if left to their own devices coders would create a thriving and tolerant software ecosystem and the main thing stopping them has been IP law. And a secondary thing stopping them has been government pressure (there has been a bit of a spasm recently because of the aftereffects of, effectively, systems set up to support things like Operation Choke Point, for example).
Assuming some semblance of the rule of law, Google & friends ultimately can't stop someone competing with them unless the government is active in the space the space too. More formal regulation is probably just going to cement their position further.
Year after year, big business lobbies, bribes, cajoles, blackmails, whatever it takes to get rid of attack dog regulators like Lina Khan.
I'm sorry friend, history does not say what you think it does. History says that good outcomes come from either brutally regulated monopolies (ATT / Western / the Labs), public/private partnerships (DoD funding the Internet, basically every major innovation we coast on today), and busting the fucking chops of mega-trusts (JP Morgan, Gould, steel, railroads, telegraph, it goes on and on).
Why does big business hate aggressive regulation if it's "actually good for them"?
They like a Goldilocks regulation, a little friction to new entrants, a lot of discretion in the hands of pliant former industry people.
They hate Lina Khan.
None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.
They don't have anything against regulators and they certainly don't have anything against dumb regulators.
They've got a little red laser dot on the forehead of regulators who don't want a payday after a term of "public service".
"Because we poor public servants are always looking for some fat, private sectors payoff down the road. But I'm not looking, and by the time they can pull the strings to force me out, they'll be ruined."
- Chrisjen Avasarala
If we destroy an entity that has power, the power goes someplace else and in the case of (democratic) government entities, it rarely ends up someplace better for us regular folks.
The question is whether those things are going to be determined at a polling place by voters or in a smoke-filled room by gangsters.
People so often rail against a government telling them they can't do something but so rarely justify they would be able to do it if the government was destroyed.
But lets call it what it is: when a bunch of made men see a power vacuum and set up an informal clique with its own rules and loyalty tests while protesting "just a merchant nothing to see here"?
Thats like, the entry for gangster on the Wiki for the Sopranos.
Only regulators have absolute power in this regard. I'd prefer decentralized power
It's concerning that you don't see this, but makes no difference to how the world works.
But they're dictators. There's no democracy, there's no voting, and Apple does whatever it feels is best for them. Just like a dictator would run their country.
There's plenty of mutually beneficial arrangements that Apple unilaterally struck down because they want to maintain their stranglehold on the market.
So, "no regulator" doesn't mean freedom from regulation; it means the emergence of undemocratic, unchecked power by whoever can grab and wield it.
At some point, "Big Tech" is really "Big Finance" in disguise.
Khan forced the employees and investors to continue working and gambling on a company they might not have wanted to continue working for or gambling on. It doesn't really matter that the gamble succeeded in this case.
First this is all hindsight now. We don't know the probabilities of this outcome vs. others. Figma's shareholders didn't at the time, which is why they chose to sell. Khan didn't either.
Second, 3x over two years isn't that much. There must be many opportunities in SV for all of Figma's employees and investors that could have given them a much higher return than that with much less risk.
I don't have this data, but one could look at secondary sales in the past two years as a measure of the increased risk and opportunity cost, right?
Any delay of people getting liquid impacts the creation of other startups, both by the Figma people who can now leave and do their own thing and for the companies Figma stakeholders would have invested in . This is super hard to measure but it is the kind of thing markets are good at measuring when they ask shareholders "sell now to Adobe or wait to IPO?"
This seems really good for Figma users, most of all. Most of the value destroyed by the acquisition would have been in the distortion and likely ultimate destruction of a company culture that made an insanely good product.
But those people are capable of going and making new products, and maybe Figma at its current phase is now too boring a thing for their talents, and should be managed by a more boring organization staffed by people who are slightly less able to make another Figma.
Who knows, but I doubt Khan (or any one individual or organization) is in a better position to assess the optimal delivery of what people want than the incentivized distributed intelligence of all the stakeholders and the people and markets around them.
Again, there are other reasons to do this that markets wouldn't quantify.
"The Bottom Line
A 73% annualized return would:
Easily rank in the top 10-20 best-documented investment returns of all time if sustained for multiple years
Significantly outperform virtually all professional fund managers and legendary investors
Be 7x higher than the long-term stock market average
Turn $10,000 into $30,000 in just 2 years (your 3x example)
Early-stage growth of revolutionary companies (like early Apple, Amazon, or Netflix)
Cryptocurrency bull runs
Highly leveraged trades
Exceptional market timing during recovery periods
Small/micro-cap stocks experiencing explosive growth
In choosing to sell they decided the risk wasn't worth the reward.
If you were in their position, would you have sold or held?
As a founder? Obviously I hold unless I know something is rotten in Denmark and it's about to collapse like a Michael Siebel sale to Autodesk. Are you kidding? I've got a startup so successful that I'm already a billionaire and my choices are:
- let it ride, be a star, chart my own course - go work for fucking Adobe lol
Yeah, easy one.
If I'm an early VC or a limited partner with some structural reason to need the cash before some accounting period ends or something? Maybe I want the sale. Maybe I own a bunch of Adobe stock and I want the consolidation. Maybe a lot of things.
Don't know why the deal got agreed to pending regulator approval. If I'm an already richer-than-God founder, or an employee who can either get full value for my shares or get Windsurf'd in some preference shenanigans, or most anyone else involved? Then fuck Adobe.
Maybe they were seeing the AI boom on the horizon and wanted the capital out now to deploy there. They wanted to chase AI not hodl some “old” pre-AI thing. A lot of people think AI is going to render the entire process of which Figma has become a key part obsolete. (I don’t.)
Those are two things I can think of to explain this behavior.
Also some people like to get out when they’re ahead. “The world is full of rich people who sold too soon, not rich people who sold too late.” This makes sense if you are generally pessimistic, which many are for various reasons.
a lot of tech darlings have been decimated by the stock market. & Adobe can still buy them once they're public, maybe even cheaper than $20bn.