Cory Doctorow: IP (2020)

I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle.

> I'd like to see this general rule somewhere. People say it often, and cite a few examples, but nothing that amounts to a general rule that I have seen.

Pick any megacorporation that has reached a point in terms of market cap where they can dictate favourable political/economic conditions for themselves, so from when companies started appearing, so mid-late 1700s. With the caveat that almost all of them have "good" effects from specific perspectives: all huge eastern trading companies (Dutch & British East India), all huge western trading companies (well, sure, they traded slaves but yowza, look at how much they put into the economy!), all huge chemical companies, all large arms manufacturers, all huge oil companies, Japan when split between zaibatsus, etc etc etc. Doesn't seem to matter what sector they are in apart from it involving control of a necessary resource.

> Also, it’s simply not true that these companies only real aim is to generate money from investors.

Yes it is, that's what the point of a company is. It's literally the definition. It's why a company as a legal/business entity is formed. Hiring subject matter experts -- well, yes, obviously a company will do that, and those experts will have personal reasons for working for the entity that are most often not directly be "enrich this entity". But that is for the most part irrelevant to my point.

> And really - the companies we’re talking about have only had this ‘power’ for just over a decade, and frankly all of their products, Google, Apple, and Facebook are quite lacking

Their products being lacking from your perspective isn't really relevant here either. Google and AWS control and sell access to physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, cross spectrum products built on that infrastructure, tools to use that infrastructure. They control [a large % of] both ends of the pipe, so to speak. Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in. FB, well as a minor example: "ah well, yes, it was kinda sorta mainly organised on our platform using our infrastructure, but whatcha gonna do?".

And only having this level of power for a decade? Again, why is that important, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

Ok, I'll concede I'm only talking about the vast majority of companies operating in a capitalist system: their broad goal is to make profit. There are companies formed whose explicit (or hidden) aim is not to make profit, to just use the legal frameworks surrounding companies to their advantage, sure (more than there are companies formed for profit-making purposes? But are they then actually companies in anything but name? Is that too reductive, I dunno)

The people working for them may have goals to use that profit in a specific way, but the company is not a person (yes, legally it can pretend to be, but it still isn't).

And a public company is almost universally a vehicle to generate money for investors

This really isn’t reflective of reality.

The vast majority of companies in a capitalist system are small to medium sized businesses that are constrained in how much money they can ever make.

Money is an incentive, and there are certainly some companies whose sold purpose is to make profit. As I said these are in the financial sector.

But you only have to look around to see that the vast majority of people who both run companies and who work for them are not in it to maximize profit.

That doesn’t mean they don’t want to succeed against competitors, or that they don’t need profits to survive. Of course they do.

But you simply can’t reduce a company to this.

A common theme on HN and of people in general is people asking how they can make a project profitable. This is indicative that the project is the goal and the profit is merely a necessary condition for achieving it.

A lot of public companies these days don’t give control to the investors. This is also consistent with the company not existing primarily as an investment vehicle.

If you own a house and rent it to someone, you would pay both the property tax on the house itself and the income tax on the rent. Seems normal to me.

> And only having this level of power for a decade? Again, why is that important, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

Frankly it’s been much less than a decade. Apple (for one) was far less dominant a decade ago, indeed many people were still declaring them to be doomed.

What this means is that we may well be looking at a transient phenomenon. You simply do not know how stable this ‘power’ is. If they had been entrenched for a few decades, the case might be stronger.

Consider how long it took for Apple to develop their iPhone business. Years of theorizing, followed by 5 years of serious R&D work before it was even released, then more than a decade of growth before reaching a market penetration of less than 20% globally.

Why would you expect a competitor to take any less time than that to unseat them?

If we use Apple themselves as the model, we’d expect a competitor to be a product that is two years away release today, and 12 years away from being taken seriously as a threat.

Consider that in 2005 during the rise of the iPod, most consumer electronics manufacturers considered Microsoft to be the dominant force in their space, and ‘does it work with windows’, was what they thought mattered. The cloud was barely relevant, and Apple, was still considered a boutique vendor.

Apple is now a ship whose direction is slow to change, and they are ripe for disruption.

This all applies to the others equally. FB in particular already shows obviously signs of losing dominance.

> Apple, I dunno, I don't know much about how they got to the position they're in.

If you don’t know how they got into the position they are in, how do you know how stable it is, or how vulnerable they are to competition? I.e. how can you analyze their business?