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American tech giants are making life tough for startups

economist.com

81–90 of 166 posts

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#81
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a fair point. Liquid salary doesn't usually go much beyond 200k; all of the additional comp is in RSU's. If there is a huge downturn, a lot of engineers will lose a great chunk of their assets.

My current "quarter life crisis" is around this number, it appears to getting from $150-200k in liquid salary is MUCH more difficult than $100-150. So if liquid income is your "north star metric" job wise, what do you do?

RSUs in a public company are liquid, they can just be volatile.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#82
post #80
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't get to make that choices. It was forced on you.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#83
This article makes the case for government intervention [0]. The central thesis is that, had Microsoft not been sued for antitrust in the 90s and wary of yet another lawsuit, they would have killed Google in its infancy. Apparently anonymous sources in both companies confirmed this would have been a distinct possibility.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#84
This is not anti competitive behaviour. In fact, this IS competition. Competition means all sorts of actions that lead to me having more customers than you. The only problem is when the entrenched business use govt/lobbying/abusive patent law to get this done. Buying out competition and trying to enter a low barrier to entry business is the very definition of competition. Suck it up

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, joke is on us, because they'll still develop the thing they told the pentagon they would develop, all while appearing to be 'good guys' to people (which is apparently quite a few people) who don't understand how contracts work.

New ReCAPTCHA: select the correct person for a drone strike to proceed.

I like to pretend that google is asking users to answer captcha questions to help waymo cars drive. "Which images contain a stop sign"...

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#86
post #83

This article makes the case for government intervention [0]. The central thesis is that, had Microsoft not been sued for antitrust in the 90s and wary of yet another lawsuit, they would have killed Google in its infancy. Apparently anonymous sources in both companies confirmed this would have been a distinct possibility. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...

Hypotheticals don't work in law. You don't punish someone who hasn't commited a crime.thats common law. Now if it were Europe style civil law, it would be different. Also if Google had died in its infancy, there's nothing that guarantees that another search engine would not not prop up. All great ideas come to fruition when the time is right. 'Search' was ready in 1999. Similarly many falsely believe that the internet wouldn't exist without DARPA. Note that packet switching etc had already found private profitability and without govt regulation would have expanded to become the foundation of the internet

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#87

Google: we're so righteous we won't take Pentagon contacts. Also Google: let's make the click through EULA as uninteligible as possible when we record our user's locations.

> we're so righteous we won't take Pentagon contacts. I think you mean "won't renew". They already took them.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pentagon+google&ei=Je0UW8mlK...

It's kind of strange how the query 'penatagon google' returns pages of uniform results, only articles containing variations of 'Google won't renew Pentagon contract'

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#88
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't get to make that choices. It was forced on you.

Nobody forced me to program for iOS.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#89
post #83

This article makes the case for government intervention [0]. The central thesis is that, had Microsoft not been sued for antitrust in the 90s and wary of yet another lawsuit, they would have killed Google in its infancy. Apparently anonymous sources in both companies confirmed this would have been a distinct possibility. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...

Hypotheticals don't work in law. You don't punish someone who hasn't commited a crime.thats common law. Now if it were Europe style civil law, it would be different. Also if Google had died in its infancy, there's nothing that guarantees that another search engine would not not prop up. All great ideas come to fruition when the time is right. 'Search' was ready in 1999. Similarly many falsely believe that the interne…

The NYC article isn't really about a hypothetical. It's about foundem.com's battle with Google over maybe being lowered in Google's rankings because they are a rival search engine.

Whether Google should be punished for that, assuming it's true, or left to rank things as they like is more the debate.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#90
post #83

This article makes the case for government intervention [0]. The central thesis is that, had Microsoft not been sued for antitrust in the 90s and wary of yet another lawsuit, they would have killed Google in its infancy. Apparently anonymous sources in both companies confirmed this would have been a distinct possibility. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...

Hypotheticals don't work in law. You don't punish someone who hasn't commited a crime.thats common law. Now if it were Europe style civil law, it would be different. Also if Google had died in its infancy, there's nothing that guarantees that another search engine would not not prop up. All great ideas come to fruition when the time is right. 'Search' was ready in 1999. Similarly many falsely believe that the interne…

Isn't hypotheticals the entire basis of civil asset forfeiture? Civil forfeiture as practiced in the United States is based entirely on the supposition that all property is subject to seizure without any burden of proof on law enforcement and that the owner has to prove they bought the property with legal means. Hypothetically everything someone owns was bought illicitly. Any law enforcement agency can just claim it, though it's in practice they like to take cash because there's a low chance of a paper trail and dispute resolution in favor of owners with that. Property is always assumed guilty in 42 states and federal court. https://www.splcenter.org/20180116/civil-asset-forfeiture-fo...
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