American tech giants are making life tough for startups
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Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#2This is also responsible for geographic inequality throughout the country.
The large tech companies are based out of Silicon Valley and Seattle. The majority of their employees and economic activity will be in those areas.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#3Another reminder, alongside the apparent Microsoft GitHub acquision, that regulators need to step up and prevent large tech firms from acting anti competitively.
From another Economist article ("How to Tame the Tech Titans", https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/01/18/how-to-tame-the...):
> Two broad changes of thinking would go a long way towards sensibly taming the titans. The first is to make better use of existing competition law. Trustbusters should scrutinise mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralise a potential long-term threat, even if the target is small at the time. Such scrutiny might have prevented Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Google’s of Waze, which makes navigation software. To ensure that the platforms do not favour their own products, oversight groups could be set up to deliberate on complaints from rivals—a bit like the independent “technical committee” created by the antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001. Immunity to content liability must go, too.
> Second, trustbusters need to think afresh about how tech markets work. A central insight, one increasingly discussed among economists and regulators, is that personal data are the currency in which customers actually buy services. Through that prism, the tech titans receive valuable information—on their users’ behaviour, friends and purchasing habits—in return for their products. Just as America drew up sophisticated rules about intellectual property in the 19th century, so it needs a new set of laws to govern the ownership and exchange of data, with the aim of giving solid rights to individuals.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#4As a hardware engineer who admittedly has a bit of contempt for software types, I can't help but think that maybe software startups just aren't novel enough these days? As noted in the article, software has dramatically lowered the barriers to starting a company, so isn't it inevitable that major companies would exploit the same low barriers (powered by their ability to gather intelligence on the next big thing via their platforms)?
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#5As a hardware engineer who admittedly has a bit of contempt for software types, I can't help but think that maybe software startups just aren't novel enough these days? As noted in the article, software has dramatically lowered the barriers to starting a company, so isn't it inevitable that major companies would exploit the same low barriers (powered by their ability to gather intelligence on the next big thing via t…
why contempt?
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#6While I agree with more efforts to thwart tech industry anti-competitive behavior, and I hardly think the prominent tech giants are innocent in this, I also think it’s disingenuous to act like modern start-ups are stereotypically “the small business owner” or that their own behavior isn’t at least partly to blame.
My interactions with start-ups have rarely been pleasant. As an employee, I was underpaid (and wildly so on a risk-adjusted, expected value basis when comparing the lowered salary with what could be earned elsewhere), overworked, and felt the management was not informed either on the business side or the tech side, but instead came off as people with wealthy parents who viewed starting a company as the modern day status equivalent to what socialite children used to think about non-profit work or humanities graduate school.
If we’re being honest, there’s a lot of dysfunction with the way start-ups are operated, and plenty of misaligned incentives that lead to running a business more to drive hype than to actually find a product-market fit or empower employees to be productive.
Before I would start thinking, “won’t somebody think of the start-ups!” — I’d expect them to be a lot better behaved, a lot more concerned with ergonomics & healthy work places, more sincerely interested in productivity, and more eager to pay competitively. If they’re doing all this right, then I might have more sympathy when a bad actor displaces then for real anti-competitive reasons.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#7Please, for the sake of all that is holy, let's not let Coinbase get sold to Facebook.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#8As a hardware engineer who admittedly has a bit of contempt for software types, I can't help but think that maybe software startups just aren't novel enough these days? As noted in the article, software has dramatically lowered the barriers to starting a company, so isn't it inevitable that major companies would exploit the same low barriers (powered by their ability to gather intelligence on the next big thing via t…
Yes, also tall trees in the forest block the sunshine to smaller trees, at times. However, software and hardware need each other and although one may say that hardware is where the true innovation lives, our ability to reason and make practical use of data is limited by our understanding of computing science.
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#9As a hardware engineer who admittedly has a bit of contempt for software types, I can't help but think that maybe software startups just aren't novel enough these days? As noted in the article, software has dramatically lowered the barriers to starting a company, so isn't it inevitable that major companies would exploit the same low barriers (powered by their ability to gather intelligence on the next big thing via t…
why contempt?
I assume it is because he thinks engineering involves making physical objects, rather than abstract ones.
I am a software guy, and I have heard other hardware guys make similar statements as well.
An example is a physical car engine (hardware), vs a video game rendering "engine" (software)
Re: American tech giants are making life tough for startups
#10Another reminder, alongside the apparent Microsoft GitHub acquision, that regulators need to step up and prevent large tech firms from acting anti competitively. From another Economist article ("How to Tame the Tech Titans", https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/01/18/how-to-tame-the... ): > Two broad changes of thinking would go a long way towards sensibly taming the titans. The first is to make better use of exist…
The problem is that regulators rarely have the farsightedness to see which acquisitions are indeed anti-competitive. And I don't think it's always obvious, especially on the bleeding edge of tech. The farsighted ones are probably part of the acquiring company (or at least acting as consultants to the hiring company).