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Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

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Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#71

Post by pembrook »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
wildmusings wrote: post #7

I am ultimately skeptical of companies that get all of their revenue from advertising and who fail to make money from sales of products. The value of online advertising is massively inflated. Of the tech giants, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft seem to be in the best shape at the moment. They make their money from selling real products and services to real end users. Amazon is strong but not unbeatable. Walmart in partic…

> Microsoft's wins are hard fought and fair No, they were unfairly fought. Don't let the fact that it is your former employer cloud your vision. Not many companies have such a sordid history of unfair competition as Microsoft does.

If the Justice department hadn't bungled the antitrust case over the wrong target (focusing on IE instead of their OEM rebate strategy used to corner the market) Microsoft might not have existed today in the same form.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#72

Post by wayn3 »

weirdstuff wrote: post #61
wayn3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i believe that happy customers would count as valid evidence. when i use google or amazon, im usually pretty happy with the service they provide. when i have to stand at a walmart cashier for half an hour while the lady has to yell for the manager because she needs to issue a $1.20 refund, im not as happy. when I have to go to the library of alexandria to find a piece of infomration that im looking for but then they…

Right, but how to measure that? For example, do we know a company's customers are happy because the company has grown to be large? Like Comcast. Comcast has a lot of customers, maybe they're happy ones? Otherwise how did Comcast grow to that size? (See what I'm hinting at?) There are different interpretations of Comcast's success at customer growth and retention.

its because comcast is a monopoly.

google was not a monopoly when it became popular. it was the idiot 12th search engine that nobody needed.

i get what youre saying, but its pretty obvious why a company gets big. its either holding some form of monopoly or people want it. there are not many other options to be honest.

you dont become the most popular car manufacturer by producing a bullshit product that people neither need nor want.

besides, why is comcast even a negative example? why did you pick that? its because you KNOW FOR A FACT that everyone hates comcast. even I know that. and i have nothing to do with america. people hate comcast. that may as well be a dictionary example sentence for the word "hate". how do we know that everyone hates comcast? because people say so every single day. just measure that. if you want to know whether a company is loved or hated, just ask their customers.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#73

Post by lisper »

virmundi wrote: post #57
lisper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the major difference that the ultimate decision-making power would be more widely distributed.

Maybe. Depends if they set themselves up as a co-op. They could instead essentially start as a highly focused VC. At that point the control will probably rest in the hands of the board and management.

But the investors have the power to replace the board. This is called "representative democracy" and it's widely considered, despite its flaws, a better way to govern human affairs than dictatorship or oligarchy.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#74

Post by scarface74 »

izacus wrote: post #8
wildmusings wrote: post #7

I am ultimately skeptical of companies that get all of their revenue from advertising and who fail to make money from sales of products. The value of online advertising is massively inflated. Of the tech giants, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft seem to be in the best shape at the moment. They make their money from selling real products and services to real end users. Amazon is strong but not unbeatable. Walmart in partic…

The problem with that is that those companies can use the ad revenue to dump prices in other field and essentially drive any possible competition out of the market. This can cause a dangerous snowball where a few huge corporations control several markets and competing is impossible because they don't need to earn profit (or earn anything at all) on those secondary markets. Add vendor lockin and you just created a cor…

And what will happen to these companies as more people start blocking ads? Apple introduced an ad blocking framework into iOS a year or two ago and this year they are going even further with blocking tracking cookies and letting users default to reading view.

So sure the "unwashed masses" will see ads but ad buyers are going to start losing their most affluent audience - the people who are willing to pay not to see ads whether it be buying an iPhone or subscribing to ad free services.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#75

Post by scarface74 »

adtac wrote: post #23
wildmusings wrote: post #7

I am ultimately skeptical of companies that get all of their revenue from advertising and who fail to make money from sales of products. The value of online advertising is massively inflated. Of the tech giants, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft seem to be in the best shape at the moment. They make their money from selling real products and services to real end users. Amazon is strong but not unbeatable. Walmart in partic…

I disagree. Advertising has been around since the 1800s and I don't really think it'll be going away anytime soon. And besides, Google is diversifying its portfolio these days anyway (GCP, Google Home, Waymo, and tons of moonshots).

Correction they are trying to diversify but they are still making 90% of their profit from ads.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#76

Post by cmurf »

Regulating them ultimately doesn't work very well because a.) it's reactive rather than proactive, so there's regulatory lag b.) it injects politics, and political wind c.) because of a and b we get inconsistency, changes in policy, this isn't good for either consumers or employees or investors.

I'm not sure what the work around is, but for sure we (Americans) do not apply anti-trust / competition law as aggressively as we should. It just seems wrong to me to allow these big companies to buy up smaller companies and then just obliterate them into nothing, not use their technologies, just destroy them by putting the patents into a vault and sue anyone who infringes but not letting anyone benefit either. They all do this to varying degrees.

It's like at a certain market value as a percentage of either global or maybe national wealth, companies should be disallowed from mergers of any kind. And at another level of size, they are required to break themselves up into pieces.

Edit: Maybe disallow hoarding patents. If after X years you're not using a patent, it either auto-expires and is relegated to public domain, or it's compulsory to sell it. Use it or lose it!

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#78

Post by pikzen »

slice_of_life wrote: post #69
jondubois wrote: post #14

I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy. If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value t…

I can't take it anymore! I have to speak out. >The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value that they produced. What is up with all this egalitarian nonsense? There is an obsession with equality that I just don't get. Where is all the envy coming from(because that's what it is)? This is an affront on capitalism which has served to lif…

>What is up with all this egalitarian nonsense?

Just the wish to have a society that is able to evolve, to have all of us go forward as a species instead of concentrating the power in the hands of few.

>There is an obsession with equality that I just don't get.

That's called being a bit of a sociopath, but it gets better.

>This is an affront on capitalism which has served to lift so many out of poverty.

Good! Capitalism did a lot of good. Now it's time we go past it, because it is not appropriate anymore.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#79

Post by pikzen »

jimmywanger wrote: post #68
RubyPinch wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we vote on the governance of facebook and google like we do with the government? (where every person's vote is equal) if so, where can I register to freely vote edit: since it doesn't seem clear, my comment is sarcastic

Sure, it's called the stock market. You buy a share and you get a vote.

Every country that has a functioning democracy has realised that money is not speech.

Every sensible person also realizes that this is not a solution. Have more money than someone else? Well, tough shit, your vote shouldn't be worth more. Stocks work the opposite way.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#80

Post by devuo »

lisper wrote: post #38
devuo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, only very large companies are able to make a certain class of investments in infrastructure and services — that push technology and society forward as a whole — that small to mid companies due to lack of capacity never could, and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would.

That's true, but it's not clear which way the causality runs. If wealth were more evenly distributed, ordinary people could pool their resources to make the same investments. They can't do that now because they have no disposable income to invest.

But people do in fact make their own small investments when they opt for one provider of a service or the other.

For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers.

If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.

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