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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

#111

Post by softwaredoug »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #74

The tech giants have learned to think on longer time horizons than capital markets have. Which means that big companies and VC's (their vendors) ultimately end up dominating most startups, which in turn means that the original core essence of the company that made it successful in the first place gets weeded out for short term gain. The companies that can resist these powerful dynamics are very rare. They tend to be…

Good point. We may be in this position because private investors on average are naive buzzword chasing sycophants while Google etc have scale, leverage and knowhow to direct and control the market over the long term.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#112

Post by cbzbc »

la_oveja wrote: post #96
nickpeterson wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.. but in real time.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#113

Post by scarface74 »

nostrademons wrote: post #65
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.

"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.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#114

Post by dvtrn »

softwaredoug wrote: post #109
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…

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 almost quipped that vacation rental marketplaces may be the exception but then I remembered Expedia acquired a bunch of them, including a former employer so there went that.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#115

Post by intended »

softwaredoug wrote: post #109
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…

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. The cycle then repeats.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#116

Post by shardinator »

tim333 wrote: post #89
pravinva wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The NYC article isn't really about a hypothetical. It's about foundem.com's battle with Google over maybe being lowered in Google's rankings because they are a rival search engine. Whether Google should be punished for that, assuming it's true, or left to rank things as they like is more the debate.

Perhaps they should be free to do as they choose, but make what they are doing very explicit. In the early days Google heavily promoted the idea that their rankings were independent and free of commercial biases, and we now implicitly assume that's true. If that's not the case, then perhaps we enforce explicitness about that - somehow.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#117

Post by eeZah7Ux »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #105
orcdork wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yet us tech workers are some of the highest paid people in the world, and technological progress is advancing at a rate never before seen in human history. I guess the current system isn't so bad.

> Yet us tech workers are some of the highest paid people in the world

...and inequality is skyrocketing.

> technological progress is advancing at a rate never before seen in human history.

Compared to the growth between 1900 and 1950, we should have teleportation now.

I'm not making a joke: life-changing progress keeps slowing down. E.g. refrigerators, washing machines, cars, airplanes, x-rays VS internet and smartphones.

> I guess the current system isn't so bad.

Compared to what? That's a false dichotomy fallacy.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#118

Post by eeZah7Ux »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #25

How is this news? Yesterday’s immigrants make life tough for future immigrants. Likewise, yeaterday’s startups make it hard for new startups. It’s a circle of life. Evolution at play. Capitalism at play.

That view is pure social darwinism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#119

Post by onetimemanytime »

softwaredoug wrote: post #109
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…

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.

>>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...

when it's your startup it's 100%. But they don't need to score perfectly always. They can raise your costs by 100 fold if they want, and if they fail, so what, they try another thing. Time and time again and still have tens of billions in bank. The startup has 4-5 months of salaries, if lucky.

Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups

#120

Post by microcolonel »

I don't know, maybe I'm not enough for the startup but I don't feel very intimidated. If I've ceded control of my board, surely they can sell the company. If I make a product that Microsoft or Google or Apple can copy in the next 6 months. then surely that is my fault.

Added: I will say that I am not comfortable with some of the state powers that allow other businesses to mangle the legal system around you to sabotage you, but the solution to that is less state control (thus less reason to lobby), not more.

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