Submitted by The original headline (I changed it) is clickbaity, but the article raises good points.
In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.
They’re all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.
We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about “the curse of bigness” were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson’s counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.” We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the “fake news” business to know that Brandeis was right.
Any entity which becomes a threat to the well-being of our society, our planet, or the people on it must be dealt with. I’m not quite sure if e.g. Google or Apple qualify for that, and if they do, how to deal with that, but I sure as hell do not wish to live in a society where any one corporation is more powerful than the people.
“…but I sure as hell do not wish to live in a society where any one corporation is more powerful than the people.”
Well, I suppose you can thank your lucky asterisks that you don’t live in the U.S., because more and more often, they have more power than we do.
e.g. Look at your John Deere articles, United Airlines (any airlines?), the phone company, etc.
Let’s get back to it, however… how could we use the Operating System or its news as a method to regain control?
One way would be to run Debian on RISC-V ( http://www.osnews.com/story/29778/Debian_GNU_Linux_port_for_RISC-V_… ). Or, more generally, as much open software on hardware that is as open as possible.
Or these companies could just close up shop and not sell you anything. Nobody owes you anything. Amazon doesn’t have to sell you ebooks. They could just go away and sell you nothing.
Google and Amazon aren’t threats they are benefactors of mankind.
If Amazon is the most popular book seller it’s because people *choose* to by the most books from them because they are better than the alternative.
If you don’t like Amazon write and print or email around your own books
Or better yet start a company to compete with Amazon and do a better job!
Instead of trying to break up companies that do mankind a massive service how about creating something to enrich mankind yourself. What an idea.
Edited 2017-04-25 01:54 UTC
You can’t be serious.
Amazon is the biggest book seller because it sold products below cost for many years. That is called Predatory Pricing and is illegal in most countries.
Modern tech companies have a policy of deliberately breaking the law to gain financial advantage. Then they buy off legislators to make their monopolies legal.
Edited 2017-04-25 02:36 UTC
You can’t be serious.
Nobody is stopping you from buying an ebook from Bob’s ebooks in Afghanistan.
Are you actually suggesting that Amazon is somehow hurting me by selling me goods and services at the lowest possible price in the most convenient way? Amazon has been around for 22 years. I keep waiting for the Amazon Primepocalypse.
Edited 2017-04-25 02:49 UTC
It’s more about the ways they use to put competition, little shops and else into bankruptcy. It’s not giving you a greater purchasing power, it’s being kinda evil as a whole. I’m pretty sure Amazon’s CEO gets more revenue from selling you something that the dude who made/wrote it. That’s the point.
People have. Then they get bought (or sell) to the larger companies, which may or may not kill off what was started. That does not enrich mankind.
One may argue whether they should allowed to be bought in the first place, once one company is already too big. But they are already too big, so they need to be split up back to what they should have been.
Well, in theory MS was on the verge of being split, then the presidency changed and somehow the whole thing magically went away.
I’m not really sure Apple should be on that list. What do they have a monopoly on, iPhones? Macs? They don’t own a ‘market’.
Google on the other hand certainly does, as does Microsoft. Microsoft would almost be out of the waters on OS, if Apple would allow macOS to be installed on generic hardware.
The root problem with monopolies is they kill off innovation. Can you imagine where the Internet would be if we still all used Ma Bell? Hell, as it is, it is taking the local phone companies here way too long to get their ass in gear to spread out gigabit.
And yet I still do 99% of all my shopping on Amazon and love it.
Some of you sound crazy. You complain when companies make “too much” money. You complain if they don’t change enough money etc etc.
I can sort of understand complaining about your ISP being a monopoly. Or when in the US it was law that only AT&T could provide phone service or the US postal service providing crappy service but they’re the only ones allowed to mail you letters.
But Amazon and Google? If you don’t like them don’t type Amazon.com into your browser. If you think Google is a predator quit using chrome and Gmail. You can’t be anticompetitive in an industry you invented.
And don’t act like you don’t have alternatives. There are alternatives. The reason why the market share isn’t evenly split between players is because some do a better job than others.
How about you all take your own advice. When people ask for recommendations don’t recommend the best… Recommend the smallest or what you think is the worst. It will save humanity!
Edited 2017-04-25 03:03 UTC
DrJohnnyFever,
The problem is that when companies become too big, they start looking for ways to use their market power to exploit the imbalances between themselves and everyone else. It’s no longer an equal playing field and those that innovate can be held back by those in control. The free market goes well when the deck is distributed fairly, but when you’ve got too few parties holding all the cards, it’s just a slaughter that has very little to do with merit and everything to do with control.
Antitrust came about in recognition that monopolies do not serve public interests. There is a question of where to draw the line, even without monopolies companies can collude to make the market non-viable for newcomers. Sometimes to make an industry more competitive, you’ve got to break up or restrict the companies that control it. Like you, not everyone agrees that big companies should be broken up, but then we have to live with less competition, and by extension less innovation.
Edited 2017-04-25 03:31 UTC
Between competing companies you have a capitalist system. Within companies you have feudal systems. The more of any market is absorbed within one company the less free market and capitalist it becomes and the more feudal.
Feudal is fine so long as your laird is terribly nice. But one day he may wake up on the wrong side of four poster bed, and there’ll be little you can do about it.
And exactly that proves Thom’s central point.
Amazon’s core product is market share, it’s an investment driven company, not a product driven company. The books etc. just have been means to built that market share.
Just like Google, their market share basically turned them into an unregulated provider of infrastructure. Consumers (like you) are too lazy to buy elsewhere, forcing competing retailers to provide their services through Amazon and basically subsidizing their competitor.
This is worse than a traditional product monopoly. Imagine a situation where say Ford both makes cars and owns 90 percent of the car dealerships. Other car manufacturers have to pay Ford a 50% sales fee to have their cars on sale in those dealerships.
The end result is a fancy sales platform with very limited product innovation, something that has very little to do with a free market and is more like the state ran monopolies and stores in former communist countries.
Huge financial institutions have caused severe damage to many Americans lives. People have had their entire life savings decimated, their lives completely ruined. Nobody went to jail and the regulations that were put in place to prevent it from happening again are being removed.
Big oil & energy companies have severely damaged the environment, caused mass (fatal) illness, etc. and never been punished more than a slap on the wrist. Much of the regulation put in place to stop the toxic poisoning of our world and ourselves by these companies is being removed.
If we aren’t going to do anything about huge companies that literally cause death, we aren’t going to do jack shit about Google and Amazon.
ilovebeer,
You’re right on all counts. And politicians, for their part, find that they can have cozy lifestyles by consistently aligning with corporate interests. The government situation has gone beyond the pale with corrupt administrations being little more than corporate puppets. They know that they can simply make false promises about promoting lower and middle class interests during elections all the while backing corporate welfare when they get in.
It’s so dysfunctional that the median standard of living is actually dropping from earlier generations despite higher GDP. When those running the massive corporations screw up, they literally get multimillion dollar payouts, there’s just no consequences for them.
All true and beyond infuriating! Aside of an actual revolution, which would never be allowed to happen, I don’t know how to turn things around. At this point I find it really hard to be optimistic about the future of this country. When corporations are granted the same rights as actual real human beings and people have been reduced to little more than data points & metadata, where’s the light at the end of the tunnel for society? It wouldn’t surprise me if even sharing this opinion triggers some red flag somewhere because that’s the world we live in today.
Maybe something like this could be a solution for the US ?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC
There is a term for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Edited 2017-04-25 21:29 UTC
Microsoft is out? What are those people smoking?
OTOH, if the article is correct and the giants of yesterday had fallen, then likely the giants of today are going to fall, so why worry?
However, I am really disturbed by the idea of removing the “safe harbour” clause, that would not hurt those corporations, but will hurt us, the general public. The corporations won’t pay, *we* will pay.
Microsoft managed to cause a lot of harm to the software market in its prime time. For example, think about all the wasted resources on the shitfest that Internet Explorer was. Not only holding back the web for at least half a decade, also destroying millions of dollars with its security problems.
Do you think Blaster and Conficker would have been as devastating if Microsoft had not a monopoly on the desktop OS?
It’s a bit complicated than that.
If software developers were not that lazy and avare, they would support several platforms, not just Windows, hence would help people and companies to get a more heterogeneous infrastructure.
What were the alternatives to Office at that time ? What was the network support in BeOS ? What the Mac were used for ? Would everyone use IBM mainframes or Sun laptops ? Competition was there, but nearly non-existent in Microsoft’s fields.
They have their responsibilities, but buyers are also at fault. Just like nowadays in food or consumers products made in Asian countries without care for child labor and/or ecology. People wanted a lower price without thinking about the consequences of a flaw in a monoculture.
I am not blaming Microsoft or anyone for their monopoly. I am just saying their monopoly already had severe effects for all of us. This is what we are discussing here.
It’s not about laziness but a business decision to be made where to invest developer hours. This is where you get in the vicious cycle as soon as you have a monopoly, others start to depend on the same monopoly, enforcing it. And in the same way, there was much less incentive for Microsoft itself to innovate and fix their software.
By the way, Microsoft employed some shady business practices to get to that position, and some of them were also outright illegal. However if you look at Google or Facebook, you don’t really see the same pattern. Yet we face the problem that these players have gotten too big.
Kochise,
I get your points, but if the government had ruled against microsoft’s illegal product bundling and business tactics two decades earlier, the industry would have evolved to be more competitive. Contracts that prohibit manufacturers from selling alternatives should leave a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.
When you have this kind of anti-competitive environment, it directly harms the competition’s market share obviously, but more subtly it also results in investors diverting capital from alternatives. The thing is, all investors think about is ROI and so even if the disadvantages are unfair, they still have to take that into account in valuating alternatives. It doesn’t really make sense for them to go against the grain with their money. As long as microsoft was not going to be prohibited from bullying competitors, it made the decision to invest in microsoft that much easier. This really hurt competition and consumers on multiple fronts.
Edited 2017-04-25 14:16 UTC
One thing that Microsoft did with perfection : perfect software compatibility. One doc file opens well across all versions of Word. So to speak.
Try opening a doc file in LibreOffice and get your layout all screwed up. Imagine if there was 10 competing word processing applications out there, which one would serve as pivot ?
Even in the late 90s the html format was not closely followed by browser vendors. Remember the ‘blink’ tag ? So to Microsoft’s defense, they provided a kinda uniform users’ and developers’ experience.
Worldwide.
Kochise,
You are right IE was uniform. IIRC MS was ordering OEMs not to install alternative browsers to maximize IE’s market share. But this period is largely considered a dark ages among HTML developers, haha. Many of us had to support microsoft’s garbage implementation of a browser because of market share, which held back progress on the web for many years.
Also read my other input below this comment.
Perhaps Microsoft used its dominant position, but strangely didn’t finished slit in several companies as originally planned, so I guess some judges might not have found these tactics anti competitive enough to execute the plan.
Today, looks at the mess the internet had become with so many JS frameworks and scripting languages out there. Even make and build systems are obnoxious. I even made my own (makeit) to add one to the existing mess.
Edited 2017-04-25 19:25 UTC
Kochise,
Yeah, it’s the usual, appeal and try for a better judgement.
http://time.com/3553242/microsoft-monopoly/
Microsoft used to give away office with Windows back in the day, standardized the format and then block that format from companies like Open Office.
If they had opened the format like PDF then Word files would be perfectly formatted in any application.
Seriously… Documentation is out for quite a long time now and Word documents still gets screwed up into anything but Office. No magic here.
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/digformatspecs/Word…
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc313153(v=office.12).aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/gg615596(v=office.14).aspx
Kochise,
As trivial readers of this documentation, you and I can handwave this as insignificant or whatever, but in the real world someone might well experience an incompatibility because MS word used some undocumented behavior.
Anyways, it may be interesting to compare this with HTML. As you know it’s an open format that’s intended to be parsed and unlike .doc there are no obvious biases for one browser over another. Compatibility has gotten a lot better over time yet we still do find things that break because “100% compatibility” is hard, even with a format that’s designed to be portable.
Well, declaring a structure of the same format and instantiating ain’t such of a burden. Iterating through them isn’t either. Don’t fool me into fantasizing that nobody spent time debugging/tweaking those “used internally by Word” parameters to understand their usage.
10 years, dammit.
Kochise,
Haha, I do understand your frustration that it isn’t perfect. But I actually feel they’ve done a pretty good given the difficulties surrounding the format. To be honest I have more gripes about some of the UI choices than any incompatibility issues, which have been pretty minor during my own use.
People who require high ms-word compatibility might just be better off sticking with ms word, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s nice to have choices.
95% of my daily courier is done with… the venerable Wordpad from XP (that runs well on 7) because the page layout and preview is better than the version shipped with 7.
Simple layout, lightweight rtf files, etc… A pleasure.
You say that like the DEVELOPERS have control over which platform software will run on. That’s all under MANAGEMENT control. I can’t tell you how many times developers hear something like this: You want to do what? Okay, I like it… only do it for Windows. There’s not enough money in that other platform to make it worthwhile. What? Sorry, it’s Windows or nothing.
And if you have a LOT of pull in the company: Well, if you feel that strongly, do it for Windows first, then once it’s selling well, we’ll throw a couple thousand bucks at a conversion to that other platform you feel so strongly about.
That’s the problem of multi-platform support in the first place. Some posix compliant code were easily ported on several oses that were not supposed to be compatible in the first thought. I’d say suffice to have a good abstraction layer and voila.
Just like PhoneGap in the phone industry, or something similar. SDL or Allegro for games, OpenGL, etc… If standards were more common and set by government agencies instead to leave computer industry as wild as the far west was.
There are norm for driving, for tv sets, for bureaucracy, I bet IEEE and ISO could have made things further than RFC.
“Furthermore, there are strong historical and economic reasons to think that the computer field, and software in particular, tends to favor monopolies over diversity.”
http://wiki.c2.com/?RegulatedSoftwareMonopoly
“A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
You misread it, as did I.
It seemed incorrect to me, so I opened the link and found this:
The five largest companies in 2006 …
Exxon Mobil – $540
General Electric – $463
Microsoft – $355
Citigroup – $331
Bank of America – $290
… and now
Apple – $794
Alphabet (Google) – $593
Microsoft – $506
Amazon – $429
Facebook – $414
Therefore Microsoft has increased in size by $200b, as expected.
The problem is that the below sentence is worded in a way to make it seem like Microsoft are out. I’m not sure if that was intentional or not, but they regularly get left out when mentioning the world’s top tech companies now …. I guess they just aren’t cool enough to name-check anymore
“In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.”
“I sure as hell do not wish to live in a society where any one corporation is more powerful than the people”
You just described communism, fascism, theocracy and most murderous totalitarian ideologies in one fell swoop.
Aka the government is “the party” in this case.
Why do you make it out as something black and white ? Nothing in between ?
The way a government system can be build depends on a bunch of slides, not on and off switches.
2017 looks a lot like 1999. Just wait, the market will sort this out. And I will be sad, because we get a lot of free software from google and other big tech companies, but that can’t last.
I mean, somebody just made a $700 WiFi juice bag squeezer. What more evidence do you need?
Nope, $400 : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-…
Yep, that totally breaks my argument.
Not breaks, squeezes.
With two hands.
There hasn’t been a healthy economy for ages. Have a look at median income:
https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2015/05/R1506D_MCAFE…
These things are not sustainable.
Edited 2017-04-25 21:43 UTC
Anything associated with Woodrow Wilson is by definition tainted!!!
I sure as hell do not wish to live in a society where any one corporation is more powerful than the people.
you are already living in exactly this kind of society.
This is why the suggested break up of these (near) monopolies.
Only if you live in Europe would it sound like a good idea.
Not sure why Apple was included in this as they do make a lot of money but are not number one in any industry but making money. Lol.
Not number one in Computers or Smart Phones or Smart Watches or anything else as Android users love to point out.