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The Winner-Take-All Trend In Tech (newyorker.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A pair of articles about the tech industry serve to highlight a growing trend. First, Om Malik writes in The New Yorker about the failure of ride-sharing company Sidecar, backed by Richard Branson, and how it's one more example of the winner-take-all tendency with modern tech firms. "This loop of algorithms, infrastructure, and data is potent. Add what are called network effects to the mix, and you start to see virtual monopolies emerge almost overnight. ... The more we use it, the more data we give the company, and the more it is able to control where we turn our attention."
The second article is from Jacques Mattheij, who notes a different side of the trend toward one winner and a whole lot of losers: unnecessary reliance on cloud-based components to force vendor lock-in. "In many of these cases if you look a bit more closely at what is being sold you'll realize that these are just instances of a business-model that was grafted on as an afterthought onto something that would have worked really well stand-alone but where the creators weren't happy with a one-time fee from potential buyers." Companies who hit it big early can't help but stay dominant if they force users to rely on their servers.
The second article is from Jacques Mattheij, who notes a different side of the trend toward one winner and a whole lot of losers: unnecessary reliance on cloud-based components to force vendor lock-in. "In many of these cases if you look a bit more closely at what is being sold you'll realize that these are just instances of a business-model that was grafted on as an afterthought onto something that would have worked really well stand-alone but where the creators weren't happy with a one-time fee from potential buyers." Companies who hit it big early can't help but stay dominant if they force users to rely on their servers.
In a dog-eat-dog world, you end up with one very fat dog. Not always one, sometimes two. Most of the world's beer is made by two megacorporations. Most of the world's cars are made by less than a dozen companies, and a few megacorps have the lion's share among them (Volkswagen Auto Group, General Motors, Toyota). Most of the world's computers are made by Foxconn. It's the same with everything. Capitalism only sort-of works with a small population and lowish amounts of automation, and with a credible communist rival to keep it in check. Outside of capitalism's narrow butterzone, it's just low competition between exploitative megacorps and runaway inequality until the system implodes.
I also hate the way tech has been going for a long time now, towards walled-garden computing, unnecessary use of centralized online systems, user privacy violation, and worker exploitation. A disgusting industry that I hate and would like to get out of now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel