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American tech giants are making life tough for startups

economist.com

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Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

BurningFrog wrote: post #29
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #3

Another reminder, alongside the apparent Microsoft GitHub acquision, that regulators need to step up and prevent large tech firms from acting anti competitively. From another Economist article ("How to Tame the Tech Titans", https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/01/18/how-to-tame-the... ): > Two broad changes of thinking would go a long way towards sensibly taming the titans. The first is to make better use of exist…

> Such scrutiny might have prevented Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Google’s of Waze, Then again one of the main reasons people start companies like Instagram and Waze is so they can be bought by these giants.

I'd love if such companies would say this up front. "This startup aims for an exit." "This is a product demo for facilitating acquihires." It would make it easier to avoid those.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#72

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

jonthepirate wrote: post #70

I once got a legal threat from facebook when I was setting up an app because I registered a domain to serve my app assets with a name like myappfacebookorigin.com and it said that the word facebook is famous and I need to cease and desist. I wish they had paid me back for the domain or forced the registrars to warn me I would get legal threats for using their trademarked name.

It’s not obvious that using a trademark you down own might result in the trademark owner asking you not to?

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#73

Post by pm90 »

someguydave wrote: post #63
dmode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how the math works at all. 25-30 yr olds making 250k don't live in 2m homes. They usually share an apartment in SF and pay ~$2000-2500 on rent. Then when it is time to get married or move in with a gf, you get a starter home for 500-600K, putting 10% down. Now in a couple of years, your starter home has gained $200k in value. Sell that and use the proceeds for a larger single family home around 1-1.5mn. Me…

No, they move there because they hope that math works out that way, and they think they will be the one guy out of 10? 20? 100? where it actually does work out.

I don’t understand what is the unlikely thing to happen in the scenario described. If you’re talking about striking millions in startup exit/IPO money, I def agree with you it’s unlikely.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#74

Post by nicodjimenez »

The tech giants have learned to think on longer time horizons than capital markets have. Which means that big companies and VC's (their vendors) ultimately end up dominating most startups, which in turn means that the original core essence of the company that made it successful in the first place gets weeded out for short term gain. The companies that can resist these powerful dynamics are very rare. They tend to be tiny, or extremely successful (eg. Airbnb, Uber, ...). It's the companies in the middle that have to worry the most.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#75

Post by _sfsa »

Another example is Partner programs. We're relatively new entrant in the social media scheduling industry and are unable to compete with Buffer and Hootsuite because they have API access to post to Instagram via the Facebook Partner program.

In order to even apply to be a Partner we have to have a "backer" within Facebook who will vouch for us.

Weve been trying to find such a person since February and we're still not any closer to being able to apply.

It's a hugely anti-competitive approach and makes it impossible for non Silicon Valley startups to get a foothold in the market.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#77

Post by tannhaeuser »

jack9 wrote: post #69
scarface74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing that Github is reportedly unprofitable, if they aren't acquired by a profitable company, what's the alternative? What do you think Microsoft would do to harm Github? I doubt it would be as bad as what became of SourceForge.

> What do you think Microsoft would do to harm Github? GVFS. I believe Github will only deploy to Microsoft's GVFS sometime after acquisition. This is one of the more obvious plans, I thought shrug

Well they could change the terms of service and essentially drive certain types of projects away. They could limit access to older builds and versions to non-paying customers. They could limit access to verified/signed builds. They could reserve certain rights to your software such as they did with npmjs.com. They could run ads, offer IT staff skill matching and promotions, FizzBuzz-like services, or other LinkedIn integrations. They could come up with clever schemes for offering commercial licensing for open source. They could go after the enterprise package mirrors and policy checkers market Artifactory et al are serving. Not saying they'll be doing that (MS isn't stupid), but given MS is selling mainly to enterprises, there are many creative ways they could make money of it.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#78

Post by iteabagkevin2 »

oldgun wrote: post #62

> Big tech firms have been known to intimidate startups into agreeing to a sale, saying that they will launch a competing service and put the startup out of business unless they agree to a deal... > Big tech firms are able to shell out huge sums to keep top performers and even average employees in their fold and make it uneconomical for their workers to consider joining startups. Reminds me so much of the show Silico…

Don’t those points sound great for startups and workers?

1) We will give you a large sum of money for your startup. 2) we will pay our workers so much they won’t want to do a startup.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#79

Post by iteabagkevin2 »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #3

Another reminder, alongside the apparent Microsoft GitHub acquision, that regulators need to step up and prevent large tech firms from acting anti competitively. From another Economist article ("How to Tame the Tech Titans", https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/01/18/how-to-tame-the... ): > Two broad changes of thinking would go a long way towards sensibly taming the titans. The first is to make better use of exist…

These would be horrible. You make it harder to sell your startup with random oversight of small acquisitions, you’re going to scare away small and medium sized investors.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#80

Post by rimliu »

radley wrote: post #42
aitrean wrote: post #31

I'll admit I'm sitting on the fence, and perhaps ignorant about anti-competitive behaviour in tech. These companies are winning over marketplaces by providing the highest quality, and lowest price services to consumers? Hypothetically, where they slip up in providing the best services, startups could thrive? Or are there elements I'm neglecting as to how large company domination negatively impacts innovation?

In-app payment policies are a major restriction. Apple and Google have unlimited access in offering digital goods and payment methods. Third-party apps are limited in scope and taxed 30%. If two songs are sold on an iPhone for $1 each, one by Apple and another by [insert music sales app], the small app makes 0.70, while Apple makes 1.30. Lets say each has to pay 0.50 to the label for the sale. The small app profits 0…

A different look may be like this: I made an app and I gladly give away 30% (it can be less, btw) for not having to care about setting up and supporting payment, distribution and updates infrastructure, dealing with PCI and chargebacks, etc.
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