The End of the Beginning

Right but this is because startups are largely a financial vehicle to transfer value created by employees to investors and founders. If startups actually gave employees a real stake in their business, the equity math would make much more sense. Its a cultural issue, but also, the set of people working at startups for worthless equity is mostly disjoint with the set that can get hired at Google/FB. Its almost a different career.

The value of full stack engineering is also plummeting because the tooling i.e. React has gotten so good that the barrier to entry is very low.

As @oflannabhra said, I think this is a case of hindsight thinking, with little predictive impact. Privacy issues can very quickly change everything. Security issues (story on NPR today about medical devices pretty much all vulnerable and ripe for random killing of people) could as well. Climate change is going to be a large driver for technology in the near future. The tech situation is very, very dynamic right now and it is way too early to say we are going to settle down with the current tech giants.

Also, giants are giants. In manufacturing, there are absolutely vast advantages to economy of scale. In tech, except for network effects, it's very easy for a very broad array of upstart companies to dominate their respective arenas at the 100bn level.

> today’s cloud and mobile companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google — may very well be the GM, Ford, and Chrysler of the 21st century.

Well, except google is not a cloud or mobile company. They are an advertising company.

For the OP, let me think ....

There is

> IBM’s mainframe monopoly was suddenly challenged by minicomputers from companies like DEC, Data General, Wang Laboratories, Apollo Computer, and Prime Computers.

So, to shed some more light on this statement, especially about "mainframe monopoly", let me recount some of my history with IBM mainframes:

(1) Uh, to help work myself and my wife through grad school, I had a part time job in applied math and computing: Our IBM Mainframe TSO (time-sharing option) bill was about $80,000 a year, so we got a Prime, and soon with my other work I was the system administrator. Soon I graduated and was a new B-school prof where the school wanted more in computing. So, I led an effort to get a Prime -- we did. IBM and their super-salesman Buck Rodgers tried hard but lost.

The Prime was easy to run, very useful, and popular but would not have replaced IBM mainframe work running CICS, IMS, DB2, etc. Of course, in a B-school, we wanted to run word processing, D. Knuth's TeX math word whacking, SPSS statistics, some advanced spreadsheet software (with linear programming optimization), etc. and not CICS, IMS, DB2.

(2) Later I was at IBM's Watson lab in an AI group. For our general purpose use, our lab had six IBM mainframes, IIRC U, V, W, X, Y, Z. As I recall they had one processor core each with a processor clock likely no faster that 153 MHz.

Okay, in comparison, the processor in my first server in my startup is an AMD FX-8350 with 8 cores and a standard clock speed of 4.0 GHz.

So, let's take a ratio:

(8 * 4.0 * 109)/(6 * 153 * 106) = 34.9

so that, first cut, just on processor clock ticks, the one AMD processor is 35 times faster than all the general purpose mainframes at IBM's Watson lab when I was there.

But, still, on IBM's "mainframe monopoly", if what you want is really an IBM mainframe, e.g., to run old software, then about the only place to get one is from IBM. So, IBM still has their "mainframe monopoly".

Or to be extreme, an Apple iPhone, no matter how fast it is, does not really threaten the IBM "mainframe monopoly".

Continuing:

> ... like DEC, Data General, Wang Laboratories, Apollo Computer, and Prime Computers. And then, scarcely a decade later, minicomputers were disrupted by personal computers from companies like MITS, Apple, Commodore, and Tandy.

Not really: The DEC, DG, ..., Prime computers were super-mini computers and were not "disrupted" by the PCs of "MITS, Apple, Commodore, and Tandy."

The super-mini computers did lose out but later and to Intel 386, etc. chips with Windows NT or Linux.

> ... Microsoft the most powerful company in the industry for two decades.

Hmm. So now Microsoft is not so "powerful"? Let's see: Google makes it easy to get data on market capitalization:

Apple: $1,308.15 B

Microsoft: $1,202.15 B

Alphabet: $960.96 B

Amazon: $945.42 B

Facebook: $607.59 B

Exxon-Mobil: $297.40 B

Intel: $256.35 B

Cisco: $201.47 B

Oracle: $173.73

IBM: $118.84 B

GM: $50.22 B

Microsoft is still a very powerful company.

Uh, I'm no expert on Apple, but it appears that the Apple products need a lot of access to servers, and so far they tend to run on processors from Intel and AMD with operating system software from Microsoft or Linux -- that is, Apple is just on the client and not the server side.

It appears, then, that in computing Microsoft is the second most powerful company and is the most powerful on the server side.

Sure, maybe some low power ARM chips with 3 nm line widths and Linux software will dominate the server side, but that is in the future?

And personally, I can't do my work with a handheld device, need a desktop, and am using AMD and Microsoft and nothing from Apple. A Macbook might suffice for my work but seems to cost maybe $10,000 to have the power I plugged together in a mid-tower case for less than $2000.

Broadly it appears that the OP is too eager to conclude that the older companies are being disrupted, are shrinking and are fading, are being replaced, etc.

Maybe the main point is just that in the US hamburgers were really popular and then along came pizza. So, pizza is popular, but so are hamburgers!

I also go along with the point of zozbot234 at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986141

> Software is still eating the world, and there will be plenty to eat for a long time.

This captures my sentiment.

It’s hard to see how the incumbents could be beaten — precisely because how effective they are around data, buying potential competitors (Instagram, YouTube) .... but this is precisely because we don’t know what/if the next market shift is.

What happens if AI takes off? What happens if 3D printing magically becomes 100x more efficient and you can print anything you want from home?

We don’t know. It doesn’t seem like the big incumbents could be defeated, but history repeats itself.

Peace of mind.