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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

#91

Post by abdullahkhalids »

iteabagkevin2 wrote: post #78
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.

They do. The unstated statement by the GP is that what's good for an individual is not always good for society at large. Competition is good for society; monopoly is usually only good for the monopoly and those few who can threaten the monopoly but are happy to roll over for money.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#92

Post by nostrademons »

georgeburdell wrote: post #4

As a hardware engineer who admittedly has a bit of contempt for software types, I can't help but think that maybe software startups just aren't novel enough these days? As noted in the article, software has dramatically lowered the barriers to starting a company, so isn't it inevitable that major companies would exploit the same low barriers (powered by their ability to gather intelligence on the next big thing via t…

Certain segments of software startups aren't novel enough these days. It's pretty hard to start a new consumer web company or mobile app and make any money off it.

Software has the dubiously nice property of its foundations being invalidated every 5 years or so, though. You can still make a lot of money in crypto or AI, for example. Ethereum is full of smart contracts that are doing the same things microcomputers did 40 years ago, millions of times slower, that nevertheless have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for it because they redefined money in a way that somehow convinced people to pay for it. And now all of the nice properties of software like "can process more than 15 transactions/sec" have to be rediscovered, which provides plenty of fodder for entrepreneurs.

Hardware doesn't usually invalidate the laws of physics on a rolling 5-year basis, by contrast. That gives firms an ability to build up large stores of domain knowledge which can't be easily replicated by startups, so it's correspondingly harder to get a new hardware startup going.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#93

Post by pjc50 »

iteabagkevin2 wrote: post #78
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.

The sale in (1) is often on very unfavourable terms, because the valuation of a startup depends on whether the quasi-monopolist is trying to kill it or not. How much would your startup be worth if it was banned from the App Store, for example?

2) is fine .. unless there are secret no-poach agreements in place.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#94

Post by Scarblac »

rimliu wrote: post #88
throwaway13337 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nobody forced me to program for iOS.

The fact that iOS and Android are the only smartphone OSes did force you to do that.

Unless you mean that you could have made a competitor, but that's inane -- that's a completely different market, with huge barrier to entry.

Apple is using its huge market position in one area (smartphone OSes) to give itself a huge advantage in another (music apps). That's the sort of thing companies have got huge fines for in the past, or were broken in parts for.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#95

Post by eaenki »

replicatorblog wrote: post #35
BurningFrog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think people forget how inconsequential Instagram seemed at the time Facebook bought it. It was popular and growing fast, but the notion that this 12-person startup was worth a billion dollars was laughable. Read contemporaneous accounts and many reporters were incredulous. It was prima facie evidence of a bubble. I don't know if a regulator would have had the foresight to see Instagram, which was still as much kno…

This is totally NOT correct. When Facebook bought Instagram, Justin Bieber was already posting pictures there. I was already posting pictures there. My friends were already. It's not users, it's growth rate and engagement. And they were through the roofs. Also, thinking that Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg just go and throw away $1B for the sake of it... it's nuts. Also, 30M MAU mostly in EU and US it's an extremely high number. For comparison, it has grown x20 in the last 5 years since the mentioned number has been reached. Approx. it kept its growth rate relative to scale, give or take a multiplier - depending on how you do the math.

On another plan (not really related to the argument- but more as to what really made IG stand out), when almost identical services as you mentioned are similarly growing, the only difference is the endorsement behind closed doors. Instagram was endorsed by Adam D'angelo, Jack dorsey and Sequoia w $50M in its war chest

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#96

Post by la_oveja »

nickpeterson wrote: post #85
brian-armstrong wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"...

Very probably they actually do.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#97

Post by scarface74 »

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

What do you mean deploy to "GVFS"? VSTS -Microsoft's existing host solution supports the standard git web hooks today to support integration with third party CI/CD tools and supports Azure and AWS deployments.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#98

Post by scarface74 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #77
jack9 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Seeing they don't do any of that today with VSTS there is no basis to believe they would do that for Github.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#99

Post by Consultant32452 »

iteabagkevin2 wrote: post #78
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.

I have a hard time figuring out what to be angry about. One day we're upset at the evil capitalists for paying workers too little. Now I guess we're upset at the evil capitalists for paying people too much.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#100

Post by watwut »

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…

If it is true that GitHub run on long term loss, then itself is important anti-competitive problem.
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