Not the tech giants, but GDPR too.
No. The GDPR just says that you've got to care about user data. If your startup can only survive by selling out user privacy, then perhaps it doesn't deserve to exist.
American tech giants are making life tough for startups
151–160 of 166 posts
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#152This 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…
I'm not arguing for government intervention, but it wasn't hypothetical.
Microsoft explicitly detected DR-DOS and pretended that the DOS crashed instead of starting Windows, which worked just fine on DR-DOS before then. This was ruled an illegal practice even though Microsoft had been far smaller at the time.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Seeing that Github is reportedly unprofitable, if they aren't acquired by a profitable company, what's the alternative?" Lay off employees until they're profitable. Tech companies tend to invest ahead of growth, because tech markets tend to be winner-take-all and if the market grows when you don't, somebody else will take the market. They're effectively using their employees as insurance to make sure nobody else can…
I doubt thier investors were looking for a no growth botique business that never went public and never got acquired. The investors were looking for an exit strategy.
Well, for an investor, there's another option: put more money in. They only have to think about laying people off if there's no profitability and no further investment and the acquisition falls through.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#154Earlier 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.
Aside from setting up payment, all of those issue are still present with Apple / Google payments. The difference is 3% (MC, Stripe, Visa) vs 30% (Apple, Google). That 27% can easily cover those issues and far, far more.
In fact, it's worse. Payment & fraud disputes are also bound to the marketplace. What are the chances that app devs will end up being the ones eating big losses just to continue to exist?
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we're so righteous we won't take Pentagon contacts. I think you mean "won't renew". They already took them.
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.
What stops Google from forming a shell corp to handle government contracts? They can profit off the shell corp while allowing them unfettered, royalty free access to their internal technology. They can staff the shell corp with smart people who aren't anti-government, and even continue to employ them at Google so no one knows what's going on.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not always convinced Google, Amazon, etc can start a product and compete in a new market and have it work 100% of the time. These companies have plenty of their own flops. Many things come to mind: google plus, amazons smart phones, MSs acquisition Skype... Certainly they have scale advantages, but there’s also diseconomies of scale that can work against them.
I think the issue here is not the advantages or disadvantages of their scale . Rather the chilling effect - the firms themselves (may be) slow to perceive the next iteration of consumer needs. Startups on the other hand figure them out - and build a product. The big fish/spiders, with their larger webs, sense the new upstarts and THEN build those features - and then go back to whatever it was that they were doing. Th…
As can be readily observed with the MS v Netscape battle over web tech (while called a browser war, my impression is that the browser was a proxy for getting a foothold in the server market).
Never mind that MS had pulled something similar vs Novell some years prior, by bundling a client with Windows and then marketing their Exchange server as a drop in replacement for Novell's Netware. Just set up a NT box in the server room, configure the PCs, and phase out Netware.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#157tough!
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#158Earlier 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"...
I also thought they were training image recognition for self-driving cars. I also thought it was an ingenious way to solve two problems at once.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#159This is also responsible for geographic inequality throughout the country. The large tech companies are based out of Silicon Valley and Seattle. The majority of their employees and economic activity will be in those areas.
That has gradually changed a lot in the last ten years. A decent house is $150,000 to $200,000 where I'm at. That's 2,000-2,500 sq feet, 0.75 to 2 acres of land. The murder rate here is almost zero, violent crime is very low, and I have access to high speed Internet and normal shopping / consumer goods. I can day trip to multiple major metros. Public housing here is actually nice, safe, clean. The homeless rate is ne…
Doctor's and lawyer's have been noticing this sooner and taking advantage of this too.
It's called geographic arbitrage or geoarbitrage, and factor's in more than just salary. You can actually make less in many places and live better.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What about "evil capitalists" using their advantage unfairly to stifle & crush competition, keeping their profits high, while keeping salaries artificially deflated for the majority of workers. But ok, let's just create this fantastical narrative that "paying workers too little" and "paying people too much" cannot possibly apply at the same time to different segments of the population. Hell, let's even use the loaded…
What's silly is running around like Goldilocks complaining that this porridge is too hot or that porridge is too cold. Well, it's not your porridge. You're not making it, nor are you eating it. So what business is it of yours?