bubble_talk

>>because of repeated public outrage at the abuses their lack engendered.

I recommend anyone who holds this view to read at least one book written by Thomas Sowell.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Criticisms...

Repeated public outrage: cars are becoming less safe.

Economist: There is a tradeoff between safety and affordability, and making cars safer means less poor people can actually afford to buy them. In turn, this makes transportation even harder for them, which in turn means they will have fewer chances to improve their lives.

Repeated public outrage: lack of minimum wage will cause more exploitation.

Economist: Minimum wage destroys job opportunities for low skilled workers, who are already heavily marginalized in society. And once they are out of the job market, it becomes even harder for them to return to it.

Isn't this simply suppy-demand economics?

Have you ever seen a comment on HN to the effect of "yeah, if you are in the US and not already working for one of the big tech companies, at this point that just means you are not good enough to be working for them" (implying they should have been interviewing there as frequently as possible until they land in one of them, and also that every other software job falls well short in terms of compensation - implying some kind of additional stupidity on your part if you don't aspire to work for big tech).

Today it is IBM - tomorrow, it is going to be every other company whose coolness falls short of the big tech companies. I wonder what alternative IBM really had?

>>Curious do you apply the same logic to for instance Google?

Yes. The entire big tech policy is basically a no-holds-barred power grab at the moment, which is definitely not "no evil".

>>if the change is positive, why not support it?

You are supposing something did change. But anyone who has actually been acquainted with any of the folks at these companies knows that this is not true. There isn't any "standing behind the courage of your convictions" going on here. It is just "let's do what is best for the bottom line, and then make up a story which suits our recent views". Generally, this is just what politicians do. So I suppose we can now group politicians and MS Employees together into the same weasel group.

E.g. Even as MSFT was supposedly going through an embrace of open source, they were showing perma-nag popups inside Windows 7 to get everyone to upgrade (against their wish) to Windows 10. "Don't like it? Too bad. You don't have a choice in this matter". Now this is all fine - a company can do whatever it wants with its product yada yada - but then simultaneously people were talking about this "new Microsoft". Same goes with Microsoft's attempts to get a $5 tax on every Android which was sold.

So yeah, in my view, nothing's actually changed.

I was also thinking the same, especially considering that you start with this as your main reason:

"Anything whose main value proposition is about “ability to scale” will likely trade off your “ability to be agile & survive”."

The problem is that MS did quite a lot to try and discredit open source when Linux was in its infancy.

This is a bit like breaking someone's knee, and then handing them a cane to hobble on, and then patting yourself on the back for being a major supporter of the person with the broken knee.

>>What percentage of current Microsoft employees were there 15 years ago? Very few, I suspect.

Are you sure about this? I personally know plenty of folks who used to talk about the "cancer of open-source", who are still there and now happily counting the money in their bank accounts. Are you imagining that these folks decided to just "up and leave" once Microsoft started supporting this so-called "cancer"?

Facebook is somehow really good at suppressing key metrics and important stories (and I am not sure how they do it). A good example is the friendly fraud case, which if it had come out pre-IPO, would have probably killed the company, or at the very least made it impossible for them to acquire IG and WA.

I also find it odd that so many investors, stock buyers and advertisers actually trust any of Facebook's self-reported stats.

At this point, I think they have already become the Enron of the tech industry. It may still be a while before the whole thing blows up, but even Enron seemed to be doing really well right up until the moment before the bottom just fell out.

"While it only appeared in the Texas Journal, the Texas regional edition of the Journal, short-seller Jim Chanos happened to read it and decided to check Enron's 10-K report for himself. He didn't think it made sense that Enron's broadband unit appeared to far outpace a then-troubled broadband industry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Timeline_of_down...

>>really! Roubini has predicted a recession every single year since 2008!

Unlike, say, a set of sports games, you don't get an automatic reset to zero on Jan 1 2009, Jan 1 2010 etc and start with a "fresh new prediction" for year N+1. The bubble just keeps going on, as long as it is humanly possible (i.e. by exploring the limits of money printing) to sustain it. Which is why the crashes just keep getting more and more severe (which is, by the way, another indicator that your analysis is incorrect).

It is entirely possible that Roubini was correct every year, and that the populace as a whole is not economically literate enough to ask basic questions such as "How does my government decide how many units of currency to print each year?", and that once the bubble does burst, it is just the same Roubini bubble times 10.