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Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

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Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#191

Post by jl6 »

postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

Alternative take: consumer behaviour that demands complex integrated products incentivizes the formation of large corporate bodies that can marshall the many skills and resources required to make them, with the economies of scale that make them viable.

Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#192

Post by ZephyrBlu »

jl6 wrote: post #191
postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

Alternative take: consumer behaviour that demands complex integrated products incentivizes the formation of large corporate bodies that can marshall the many skills and resources required to make them, with the economies of scale that make them viable. Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.

That's true in the case of Boston Dynamics. Definitely seems less true in regards to a company like Crunchy Roll though.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#193

Post by somethoughts »

postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

Low interest rates make M&A attractive. Its very similar to real estate investing and using existing property as collateral for new property purchases. There's a low barrier for the project to result in a decent IRR.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#194

Post by ZephyrBlu »

ajit_singh wrote: post #190
unishark wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already knew it was a bull market for technology. When absurd deals are happening it could mean the bubble is about to burst though.

This immediately follows the Slack acquisition which was sold at at price that is almost 1/10th of Pakistan's GDP. Keep in mind that Pakistan has 220 million people. One individual company with less than 2k employees is valued 1/10th of what 220 million people collectively produce in a year. How can one explain this asymmetry. No doubt it was the biggest tech acquisition in the history but tech executives in the US b…

In my noob understanding, Salesforce overpaid on the acquisition for a couple of reasons:

1) They are desperate to continue growing and need acquisitions to do so

2) They believe Slack is their best bet to boost their revenue in the coming years

In saying that, the asymmetry is the markets each of them serve though. Are majority of Pakistani's serving B2B customers with a SaaS? No, and so the profit/revenue generation is different.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#195

Post by blahblahblogger »

throwbacktictac wrote: post #175
postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

Can you expand upon you thought? How do each of these acquisition make a case for the acquirer tending towards a monopoly? It seems Boston Dyanmics is a solution looking for a problem. It can be a great company but it's going to take a long investment by Hyundai. It's been in the hands of some huge companies and none of them have been able to squeeze a profit out of it.

This is a key point of Peter Thiel's in his talk at YC from some years ago. He expands on it to great effect in a few other videos too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtJ0C0UHFfE.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#196

Post by saberdancer »

jandrese wrote: post #178
postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that…

This doesn't seem to be true, biggest companies today weren't biggest companies 50 years ago. Even in IT, IBM is not giant that it was and was succeeded by newer companies.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#197

Post by beyondcompute »

jl6 wrote: post #191
postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

Alternative take: consumer behaviour that demands complex integrated products incentivizes the formation of large corporate bodies that can marshall the many skills and resources required to make them, with the economies of scale that make them viable. Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.

Another take. I think that one of the forces that promote “monopolization” on the internet at least might be the issue of trust. It’s harder to trust “smaller” (or less known) businesses on the internet and vendors on platforms like Ebay, Etsy, Airbnb. Roughly speaking there’s quite a lot of scam and low quality products/services out there. Things work differently offline where physical location can in many situations create more sense of trustworthiness even for smaller businesses. Online – your brand is extremely important. And bigger companies tend to have better established brands.

Just a speculation (and not very related to BD in particular but to a situation where internet got overtaken by corporations instead of becoming that decentralized paradise we once hoped for).

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#198

Post by rajamaka »

_trampeltier wrote: post #165
marcusverus wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's clearly an absurdity and not physically possible. And yet the market has averaged a 7% annual return since 1870.

But special this year the USD lost a lot of value. USD - CHF (Switzerland) is about minus 8.5%, so your +7% would be still a minus business for me. The high stock market and the high prices for building are more the true inflation than a true plus on the market.

USD so low that it's still higher than 50% of the years this decade.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#199

Post by andbberger »

jl6 wrote: post #191
postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

Alternative take: consumer behaviour that demands complex integrated products incentivizes the formation of large corporate bodies that can marshall the many skills and resources required to make them, with the economies of scale that make them viable. Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.

Do you actually believe that?

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#200

Post by drew-y »

saberdancer wrote: post #196
jandrese wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that…

This doesn't seem to be true, biggest companies today weren't biggest companies 50 years ago. Even in IT, IBM is not giant that it was and was succeeded by newer companies.

I don't think the comment is referring to individual companies but the market as a whole. It's clear that wealth is and has always tended to accumulate to the richest when not checked.

This article does a great job laying out some examples. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/25/six-facts...

> In fact, the top one percent alone holds more wealth than the middle class. They owned 29 percent—or over $25 trillion—of household wealth in 2016, while the middle class owned just $18 trillion.[iii]

> This has not always been the case. Before 2010, the middle class owned more wealth than the top one percent. Since 1995, the share of wealth held by the middle class has steadily declined, while the top one percent’s share has steadily increased.[iv]

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