Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted • Hacker News Board

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#51

Post by ryanmarsh » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

For the purposes of this discussion we should dispense with the word "startups" and replace it with "new businesses". Since 1970 the rate of new businesses has been falling. Gee, can anyone else think of reasons why that might be besides immigration and housing rates in the bay area? What a bunch of navel gazing. Perhaps there is a causal connection with population age? What about other factors? What if we zoom out a bit and look at general workplace productivity factors and the impact of technology? Yes, that old crusty stuff they are currently using which you don't consider technology. It's actually a lot better than how things were done before, and before that, and before that too.

And what about the rising number of old companies? Look at different industries such as air travel, raw materials, and manufacturing. What I see is Standard Oil all over again, consolidation, incremental optimizations, with a little anti-competitive behavior thrown in to boot.

That's sometimes the problem with us programmers, especially the more naive amongst us. We often believe that File > New is the answer to the world's problems when incremental optimization often is more pragmatic (and as the market shows us, more effective). It isn't sexy but it "works".

I don't know much about Home Depot but I'm going to guess that they got as big as they did (mostly) by introducing optimizations into the marketplace for home improvement products. They are not a monopoly (such as taxi services) that was created by and protected through legislation and can dissolve rather quickly (like it did in Houston this week) with a change in public support.

The tech "startup" community should stop looking at companies like Wal-Mart as evil and start to respect and marvel at the massive amounts of muda they have been able to eliminate from product supply chains. Just because they don't use Node.js doesn't make them disruptable (yes, I'm aware Wal-Mart actually does use Node).

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#52

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:03 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #28

As a Professor of entrepreneurship at NYU's engineering school (that VC Fred Wilson called a jewel -- http://avc.com/2014/03/the-value-of-an-engineering-degree ), I can summarize the problem in one phrase many of my students said when describing their goals after graduation: "... but I have to get a job at a big company to sponsor my visa." They're brilliant, motivated, and capable, but almost none are citizens. To s…

[deleted]

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#53

Post by waylandsmithers » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:04 PM UTC

brothe2000 wrote: post #15

I think the author of the article went looking for stats to support a title. Corporate America has been disrupted however I think this article was looking for financial failure versus adapting to the market pressures. The corporations below have faced massive disruption: Kodak, HP, GM, Ford, JC Penney, Sears, McDonalds, Radio Shack, Circuit City, Best Buy, Borders, Barnes&Noble, IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, and Target have…

I agree, and I think it's especially hard to observe the complete lack of Borders and Barnes & Noble locations remaining and say things haven't changed all that much. For the big players in the music and movie industries, even if they're still profitable, but had to completely change their ways of doing business, doesn't that count as disruption also?

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#54

Post by walterbell » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

drcode wrote: post #44

walterbell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any references on how to accomplish this? The link above says ".. for perfect anonymity, both sender and receiver have to split every complex transaction among separate pairs of throw-away identities. But at this point, transactions stop being technically atomic, in addition to the fact that the system becomes quite complicated and heavyweight." https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know says "Bitcoin is not anonymous .…

CoinJoin is a technology that can be viewed as atomic in regular usage (it's a generalized way of mixing coins.) As for complicated/heavyweight, most computer technology we use today was viewed as too complicated/heavyweight a couple decades ago.

Thanks for the pointer. Found a design thread that's been going for a year, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0, but no implementations. This approach seems to have the same challenge as Tor or email encryption, i.e. convincing everyone to use it.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#55

Post by sdenton4 » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:07 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #45

schnable wrote: post #30

Much of what we are seeing is the effect of our insane visa and immigration policies. The traditional entrepreneurial spirit of the United States was driven by the culture of immigrants. Over 40% of the companies on the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. These were once disruptive startups. Now we make it very difficult for talented and intelligent people to become permanent residen…

We have 7-20 million illegal immigrants in the USA out of 313 million total residents. How difficult can it really be to stay?

Illegal immigration is completely orthogonal to the topic. To run a startup, you need to be able to operate your business legally, which means the founder and employees need to be legal.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#56

Post by pyrrhotech » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:07 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #50

pyrrhotech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, state schools are still pretty cheap. My sister's tuition with room and board is $10k per year. If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+ and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of determination. And health care, while expensive, isn't as big of a deal as most people make it out to be. Get a high deductible pla…

Where?!? University of Wisconsin, for example, is $24k in-state with room and board. To get through college for $10k/year in many places, you'd need to go to one of the state's lower-tier schools in a small town and live at home. Not many state flagships are in the business of charging less than $20k.

She goes here: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl...

She does live at home. If she lived at school it would be about $17k

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#57

Post by wuliwong » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:15 PM UTC

ryanmarsh wrote: post #51

For the purposes of this discussion we should dispense with the word "startups" and replace it with "new businesses". Since 1970 the rate of new businesses has been falling. Gee, can anyone else think of reasons why that might be besides immigration and housing rates in the bay area? What a bunch of navel gazing. Perhaps there is a causal connection with population age? What about other factors? What if we zoom out a…

I agree with your overall sentiment. BUT, regarding Wal-mart, Home Depot and other large corporations; they certainly have benefited by lobbying for a better economic playing field for very large corporations. They also have attained their success and market share through innovations, optimizations and seized opportunities. I see it as a lot more complex than Wal-mart is "evil" or not. My position is that it just isn't that simple.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#58

Post by tzs » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

pyrrhotech wrote: post #33

sadface wrote: post #24

I have another suggestion for the decline in startup rates: health care and college expenses. The historically "prime" years for entrepreneurship are in one's late 30's to early 50's, years when one typically has a family in need of healthcare, college tuition, and hopefully retirement at some point down the line. In the 70's and 80's someone could leave the security of their big company, get relatively affordable pr…

I dunno, state schools are still pretty cheap. My sister's tuition with room and board is $10k per year. If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+ and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of determination. And health care, while expensive, isn't as big of a deal as most people make it out to be. Get a high deductible pla…

> Get a high deductible plan and a family of 4 can be insured for Looks like it can be done for quite a bit less than that, when ACA subsidies are taken into account (or when expanded Medicaid is taken into account if the other adult family member also has no income...I think all the states where tech startups are common went along with expanded Medicaid).

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#59

Post by PaulHoule » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:23 PM UTC

I think the promulgation of the idea of "disruption" is itself an anti-disruptive force.

The Microsofts of this world have seen the Kodaks and Xeroxes go down, so we see them doing bold things. For instance, Microsoft saw tablets as a threat to the PC, and they didn't let the fact that their customers didn't see it this way from releasing Windows 8.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#60

Post by wuliwong » Fri, Aug 08, 2014, 6:23 PM UTC

Does anyone see all the data cited in the article as only kinda tangentially related to what seems to be the main idea of the post? Isn't it possible that "corporate america" is being disrupted AND their are less new companies being formed? It seems simple enough to prove, if only 5 new companies started this year and all 5 grew to be as large as Google, that would be some serious disruption.

I am not arguing that their thesis is wrong, it just seems their supporting data falls short of proving the case. I think a more telling dataset would be a similar type of time analysis but looking at the top 500 companies by market cap. How many are new? And that might not even really be getting at the author's real point. Because, he's talking about upsetting existing industries. For instance, sure Apple, Google and MS are pretty new. But did they disrupt an industry or just make it through as the winners of a newly minted "tech" industry? I'm actually asking because this question and thesis is genuinely interesting to me.