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Comment by mangecoeur | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden.

And it's just business - it's a logical step for a profit motivated organisation. You're value is in your users and your brand. So you take steps to lock in your users, prevent third parties from using your services with through open protocols (which dilutes your brand). Nearly all the current crop of (once-idealistic) companies are at it. It's really time to start learning from history that you can't depend on private, for-profit companies to act in the common good - because doing so spreads the value around, and a company wants it all for itself.

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The moment such business stops being "idealistic" and makes that "logical step" is the moment it stops caring about providing value for customer - it reduces the value provided to monetize them better.

Well the saying goes - if you aren't paying for it, then you are the product, not the consumer.

People using twitter or google or facebook are not clients because they aren't paying. The clients are the people who pay those companies for valuable information and advertising space.

Just a nit-pick: "you are the product, not the customer". I think a "consumer" can be either. Further complicating the terminology, many sites where you're the product (and some where you're the customer) rely on you to actually be a producer of content as well.

The saying is full of crock - it presents a false dichotomy. You might pay and still be a product. You pay for cable TV but they sell you to advertisers.

> You pay for cable TV but they sell you to advertisers.

That's not quite right. You pay your cable provider for television service. The cable provider pays networks for their content (the networks are the "suppliers" in this case). Some of those networks also collect payment from advertisers, but that advertising revenue probably wouldn't go to the cable company.

> if you aren't paying for it, then you are the product, not the consumer.

That explains all of the ads I see on GNU Emacs.

You're intended to be free labor, working to improve their software.

Just because it is a saying, doesn't mean it is true. There are some things that are free (as in beer) and you are still not the product. In the case where companies are selling your data, you are both, whether or not you pay for it. The companies still need to work hard to retain you.

Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore.

I'm not sure of all the repercussions, but perhaps we can start with N at a large value, and slowly (over several decades) decrease it, and see what happens.

How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?

He indicated that the law would limit a company to N employees. The stated goal was to benefit the greater good, but the metric was simply a number.

And how do you decide what N is?

Not my problem. I'm only pointing out that the parent comment asked a question that implied a misunderstanding of GP.

I don't think the parent to your comment misunderstood the GP. I think he was making a valid point: that in order to pick the "right" value of N, you have to know what value of N will maximize the greater good. Unless you can do that, the proposed law does not make sense; and saying "I'm not trying to specify what the greater good is, I'm just picking a number N" does not change that.

in order to pick the "right" value of N, you have to know what value of N will maximize the greater good.

What? No. The comment said nothing whatsoever about 'N'. GP's comment was exactly this, and nothing more:

How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?

> The comment said nothing whatsoever about 'N'.

Not explicitly, no. I drew an inference about what the GP commenter meant (or at least an obvious implication of what I think he meant). He's welcome to correct me if my inference was wrong.

I think the obvious repercussion is that business will do everything possible to avoid this threshold, whatever it may be, up to and including cannibalizing their margins. N=500, we have 499 people, do we hire one more or find a way to automate that new need or other jobs, even if it costs more than a human would?

A cure isn't much good if it is worse than the disease.

Technology companies may be able to run with ~100 people. But how are you going to run a large hospital? The NHS in the UK employs more than a million people.

Every department could be run by a separate company. This also ensures quality at the department level.

These companies could then be hired by the hospital itself.

You were that guy promoting the "NHS internal market", weren't you? This is basically what happened: individual hospitals run by trusts, services contracted in. GPs responsible for allocating budgets. It hasn't made much of a difference beyond increasing the number of administrative staff.

Health care is working far from properly in the case of normal capitalism, so actually it is a bad example.

This does not matter at all, because if the separate companies have the same owner structure (which they will have), the segregation will be just on paper.

Right. See, for example, how the fact that some of the more stringent aspects of French labour law only apply to companies with 50+ employees leads to lots of 49-employee French companies.

An interesting idea, but it would likely result in the creation of a crap ton of (what in effect would be) umbrella companies.

"Google? No, I technically work for Search Ad Services by Google."

But think about it... Suddenly every company can have Search Ad Services as good as Google's.

Also, if you don't like what company X is doing, you just need to find N qualified people, and you can start your own X.

That's assuming that Search Ad Services by Google will have--or will be allowed to have--clients other than Google. And that, of course, is the entire point: to split a company up into what are technically smaller companies that, in effect, are just part of the head company.

Of course a company cannot be selective about its customers in a way that is anti competitive.

Ummm...yes. Yes, they can.

Coase, Ronald H. (1937). "The Nature of the Firm". Economica 4 (16): 386–405

http://www.sonoma.edu/users/e/eyler/426/coase1.pdf

Does the term "economies of scale" mean anything to you?

Even large programs can be structured such that they have small modules. The same can apply to companies.

"Can be" in some cases, yes. But in order for the proposed restriction on company size to make sense, it would have to be possible in every case. That's a much stronger claim, and one I find extremely improbable.

Well, we already know that the current form of capitalism isn't perfect either. So I don't think there is a need to prove anything for every possible case. Also, we can make exceptions when we get there (even though I don't believe they need to be made).

> we already know that the current form of capitalism isn't perfect either.

Sure, but the question is whether any proposed change will be likely to make things better, or worse.

> I don't think there is a need to prove anything for every possible case.

Maybe not, but it doesn't look to me like you've even considered what fraction of cases would lead to a net benefit under your rule vs. the current rules.

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