They occur continuously in the economy but the vast majority of opportunities are not exploited. Usually the reason is that the person in the middle of the circumstance does not realize that they are in the middle of one or they don't take action. You are looking at it through the lens of 'survivor bias'. You only see the opportunities that were captured, not the ones that were missed.
On the other hand almost all of the exploited circumstances are non-repeatable. Gates got the PC monopoly, that simply can't be repeated. But Android doesn't care, it fills a different circumstance.
There was a piece on Adafruit a few days ago about the AC motor. It was probably invented ten times before Tesla exploited it. The other people had the opportunity and failed to capitalize on it.
You are describing network effects. There are some network effects in ride sharing -- the more drivers on the platform, the faster you will get a ride, but they are nowhere near as strong at the network effects between the operating system and the packaged software market.
You obviously did not live through the heyday of Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft's OS monopoly may have been the strongest monopoly in the history of man. It was the first monopoly to cover the entire planet.
A major piece of luck for him was pricing MSDOS at $35 when UCSD Pascal and CPM were $50. He did that because MSDOS was not as good as the other two. The luck came into play because hardly anyone knew what an operating system was so they simply picked the cheapest one. Luck caused his cheaper, inferior product to end up with a huge 'first mover's advanatge'.
Those three will get you the Nobel prize, not rich.
Getting rich also involves the 'vision' thing. You have to be able to project out into the future and see where things will be, not where they are today. That's how you sort out the good ideas from the bad ones. You also need a firm grasp of economics since at some point your company has to make money.
Simply recognizing when a special circumstance hits you in the head is a special circumstance. How many people do you know say -- wow, I thought of that first! But they did nothing with their thoughts.
Don't worry about IP laws, just don't blatantly abuse them like Napster did. There is very little you can do to stop an IP troll from targeting you if they want to. You best defense is to stay off from their radar.
BTW - you can start a software company for almost nothing now. Back in BG's time PCs were $3,000 inflation adjusted to like $20,000 now. You can get a great PC today for $1000 and you probably already own it. AWS and Google will both let your try the cloud for free for a year. Lack of capital is not an excuse for not doing a software start up.
If you are not doing a startup because you need a $50,000 salary, then being a founder is not for you unless you are very creative. Instead come in as a later employee and get a salary. You will still get some upside from stock but it will be a pittance compared to the founders.
A recent example of a huge first mover's advantage is Uber. You don't have to have a market the size of Uber's, there are many smaller markets that also will work.
Starting your own company is a huge piece of it since it gives you the capital piece. Do you know about IRS section 1202 stock? With 1202 stock your first $10M of capital gains is tax free. 1202 stock is Small Business Stock. The federal government and many states do not tax gains from this type of stock since it is a major way jobs are created.
But... this company has to have an amplification effect. That is why it is so easy to make a lot of money in software. The marginal cost of 'amplification' (making another copy) is zero. Zero amplifications costs really lowers the amount of capital you need. It is certainly possible to start a software company while working else where to cover your basic expenses.
If you want to get rich you need to partake in an activity that has the potential to generate a lot of money. I have often heard people complain that they give everything working in a job and can barely keep their heads above water. Get a clue, working in a job makes the company owner rich, not you. You also need to do something that amplifies your actions. For example it is hard for a doctor to get really rich. That's because they are paid per action they perform and there is no way to scale. If you invent a drug you can get really rich since the drug goes into a factory which amplifies your invention. You also need to understand the difference between capital and income. It is far easier to get rich off from capital transactions that it is off from income.
Gates' success is impossible to replicate. He had a "first movers" advantage that is gone now. He was also greatly helped by "network effects". These are also things you need to understand to get really rich.
They should have asked for the full $1,350,000,000 that the law allows. That would demonstrate how ridiculous it is to hold scientific knowledge hostage for payments to a publisher.
I agree, I believe the simple explanation for this is that the developed countries have been working at software development for a longer period of time. The older programmers in the developed countries use a different set of programming languages. I do not see this as wealth related, it is historical.
It is still somewhat difficult to get a PC today without Windows but it can be done. In the ten year monopoly period it was impossible. If MS found any OEM that was not shipping Windows with every PC they would yank their Windows license. OEMs were so afraid that they would buy more Windows licenses than units shipped just to be 100% certain they did not violate their OEM agreement of shipping 100% Windows.
There is a good clip of a Senator (Orin Hatch?) on the floor explaining how he personally spent a week trying everywhere he could think of to buy a PC without Windows and he could not. MS was found guilty of anti-trust (not just one section, all three). They just bought off enough Congresscritters that they escaped any punishment from the guilty verdict.
Unlike, say, MS-Office or Adobe Acrobat, no one is forced to use the Google search engine, for compatibility or any other reason..
Nobody was forced to use Microsoft Windows either, never was. There always were competitive products out there. Same for Acrobat. However when Microsoft used their market power in OSes to gain a market in Browsers, the Antitrust lawyers closed in for a kill. Imho for the right reasons, even when it was unsuccessful in the end.
Same with Google: it doesn't matter how many other competitors there are or not are (and they exist, Bing being the biggest), Google has around 90%+ marketshare in general search engines. So if they use this to gain an advantage in a specialized search engine field, like price search, then they violate the law, just like MSFT did with their browser. All that matters, is Google a monopoly in the eye of the law, and it certainly is. Why or how they are a monopoly is totally irrelevant.
Don't so quick about MS Windows. For a period of about 10 years in the early 1990's it was impossible to by a PC that did not include a MS Windows license. So you weren't forced to use Windows, you were only forced to buy it. At one point I had 28 copies of Windows in my office that I had been forced to buy and did not want.
Even if you refused to agree to the EULA upon purchasing your PC the was no way to get a refund from MS other than to go to small claims court. Something several hundred people did to Microsoft.
Can they extend this to Comcast so that I don't have to watch hundreds of self serving ads tell me what a great and innovation company (uh monopoly) they are?
2.7B fine to ensure that Google will route your shopping click to search vendors making millions off from affiliate kickbacks. That's why these shopping search vendors are mad, it isn't the advertising revenue, it the up to 10% affiliate kickbacks they want. And you're a fool if you think stores paying large affiliate kickbacks have the lowest prices.
This is very different. This case is about the EU trying to suppress search results on Google's servers located in the USA. Google is already suppressing the results on its EU based servers. In the US the First Amendment specifically stop the government from doing something like this. So the EU is trying to get Google to stop doing something in America which is specifically protected in the US Constitution by punishing the EU subsidiaries.
China performs similar censorship. They do it via the Great Firewall. The way China is currently censoring, while unpalatable, it is a reasonable solution under international law.
If the EU enacts this scheme where local subsidiaries are punished to make foreign parts of the company do the EU's bidding, then it won't be long until China starts doing this to foreign companies with Chinese presence. And of course Iran, Myanmar, etc will all pile on too.
If the EU really wants to implement this crazy scheme (which is tilting windmills, like the Brits and porn) then they should build their own version of the Great Firewall and leave the rest of the world alone. Please don't trigger a cascade of these demands into another dozen countries.
The whole approach to this is screwed up. Why is Google in the middle of it? The correct approach is to bring the person complaining and the website hosting into court and come to a decision. If the decision is to prevent listing in search engines, then modify the site's robot.txt to stop any search engine from indexing the page. In the current messed up situation Google has become judge, jury and executer for the decision. In my opinion that is abdication of governmental responsibility. It is the judicial's responsibility to interpret these laws, not some panel of Google employees. Google on'y responsibility should be to respect the directives in the robot.txt.
You are also looking at the pond when the real fight is happening in the ocean. Over the next twenty to thirty years these companies are going to have global logistic networks that work in both directions. Companies in the US will be able to make their wares appear in Chinese websites similar to how Aliexpress works today. Now repeat that model in every country in the world.
So we need to feed our two sharks Amazon/Walmart and then let them loose into the ocean. Remember what Microsoft did to the software industry in the rest of the world during the 80's and 90's?
Over the next few decades the national boundaries of retail are going to disappear. Everyone will be able to sell to anyone via these global store fronts and the big logistics platforms will deliver anything anywhere in two days. You don't really think those fleets of planes Amazon and Alibaba are buying will stay in just one country, right? Alibaba just bought an entire airport in Spain.
Logistics is the key to making a global market place. These companies are going to build massive, world-wide distribution and warehousing systems and wring every last efficiency out of them. At most there will be five competitors at this scale. Two unknowns plus Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, I have forgotten the details. I have an IBM 5150 sitting on the desk next to me with a 5MB Tallgrass disk in it.
Simply saying "Lack of capital, connections or skill could have blocked them off." exhibits a mindset that is not going to make you rich.
"The easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one."
They occur continuously in the economy but the vast majority of opportunities are not exploited. Usually the reason is that the person in the middle of the circumstance does not realize that they are in the middle of one or they don't take action. You are looking at it through the lens of 'survivor bias'. You only see the opportunities that were captured, not the ones that were missed.
On the other hand almost all of the exploited circumstances are non-repeatable. Gates got the PC monopoly, that simply can't be repeated. But Android doesn't care, it fills a different circumstance.
There was a piece on Adafruit a few days ago about the AC motor. It was probably invented ten times before Tesla exploited it. The other people had the opportunity and failed to capitalize on it.
You are describing network effects. There are some network effects in ride sharing -- the more drivers on the platform, the faster you will get a ride, but they are nowhere near as strong at the network effects between the operating system and the packaged software market.
You obviously did not live through the heyday of Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft's OS monopoly may have been the strongest monopoly in the history of man. It was the first monopoly to cover the entire planet.
A major piece of luck for him was pricing MSDOS at $35 when UCSD Pascal and CPM were $50. He did that because MSDOS was not as good as the other two. The luck came into play because hardly anyone knew what an operating system was so they simply picked the cheapest one. Luck caused his cheaper, inferior product to end up with a huge 'first mover's advanatge'.
Those three will get you the Nobel prize, not rich.
Getting rich also involves the 'vision' thing. You have to be able to project out into the future and see where things will be, not where they are today. That's how you sort out the good ideas from the bad ones. You also need a firm grasp of economics since at some point your company has to make money.
Simply recognizing when a special circumstance hits you in the head is a special circumstance. How many people do you know say -- wow, I thought of that first! But they did nothing with their thoughts.
Don't worry about IP laws, just don't blatantly abuse them like Napster did. There is very little you can do to stop an IP troll from targeting you if they want to. You best defense is to stay off from their radar.
BTW - you can start a software company for almost nothing now. Back in BG's time PCs were $3,000 inflation adjusted to like $20,000 now. You can get a great PC today for $1000 and you probably already own it. AWS and Google will both let your try the cloud for free for a year. Lack of capital is not an excuse for not doing a software start up.
If you are not doing a startup because you need a $50,000 salary, then being a founder is not for you unless you are very creative. Instead come in as a later employee and get a salary. You will still get some upside from stock but it will be a pittance compared to the founders.
A recent example of a huge first mover's advantage is Uber. You don't have to have a market the size of Uber's, there are many smaller markets that also will work.
Starting your own company is a huge piece of it since it gives you the capital piece. Do you know about IRS section 1202 stock? With 1202 stock your first $10M of capital gains is tax free. 1202 stock is Small Business Stock. The federal government and many states do not tax gains from this type of stock since it is a major way jobs are created.
But... this company has to have an amplification effect. That is why it is so easy to make a lot of money in software. The marginal cost of 'amplification' (making another copy) is zero. Zero amplifications costs really lowers the amount of capital you need. It is certainly possible to start a software company while working else where to cover your basic expenses.
BG's domination of the desktop market is impossible to replicate. That particular 'first mover's advantage' is long gone.
Special circumstances happen all of the time. You just need to recognize when they are happening around you.
If you want to get rich you need to partake in an activity that has the potential to generate a lot of money. I have often heard people complain that they give everything working in a job and can barely keep their heads above water. Get a clue, working in a job makes the company owner rich, not you. You also need to do something that amplifies your actions. For example it is hard for a doctor to get really rich. That's because they are paid per action they perform and there is no way to scale. If you invent a drug you can get really rich since the drug goes into a factory which amplifies your invention. You also need to understand the difference between capital and income. It is far easier to get rich off from capital transactions that it is off from income.
Gates' success is impossible to replicate. He had a "first movers" advantage that is gone now. He was also greatly helped by "network effects". These are also things you need to understand to get really rich.
They should have asked for the full $1,350,000,000 that the law allows. That would demonstrate how ridiculous it is to hold scientific knowledge hostage for payments to a publisher.
I agree, I believe the simple explanation for this is that the developed countries have been working at software development for a longer period of time. The older programmers in the developed countries use a different set of programming languages. I do not see this as wealth related, it is historical.
It is still somewhat difficult to get a PC today without Windows but it can be done. In the ten year monopoly period it was impossible. If MS found any OEM that was not shipping Windows with every PC they would yank their Windows license. OEMs were so afraid that they would buy more Windows licenses than units shipped just to be 100% certain they did not violate their OEM agreement of shipping 100% Windows.
There is a good clip of a Senator (Orin Hatch?) on the floor explaining how he personally spent a week trying everywhere he could think of to buy a PC without Windows and he could not. MS was found guilty of anti-trust (not just one section, all three). They just bought off enough Congresscritters that they escaped any punishment from the guilty verdict.
Unlike, say, MS-Office or Adobe Acrobat, no one is forced to use the Google search engine, for compatibility or any other reason. .
Nobody was forced to use Microsoft Windows either, never was. There always were competitive products out there. Same for Acrobat. However when Microsoft used their market power in OSes to gain a market in Browsers, the Antitrust lawyers closed in for a kill. Imho for the right reasons, even when it was unsuccessful in the end.
Same with Google: it doesn't matter how many other competitors there are or not are (and they exist, Bing being the biggest), Google has around 90%+ marketshare in general search engines. So if they use this to gain an advantage in a specialized search engine field, like price search, then they violate the law, just like MSFT did with their browser. All that matters, is Google a monopoly in the eye of the law, and it certainly is. Why or how they are a monopoly is totally irrelevant.
Don't so quick about MS Windows. For a period of about 10 years in the early 1990's it was impossible to by a PC that did not include a MS Windows license. So you weren't forced to use Windows, you were only forced to buy it. At one point I had 28 copies of Windows in my office that I had been forced to buy and did not want.
Even if you refused to agree to the EULA upon purchasing your PC the was no way to get a refund from MS other than to go to small claims court. Something several hundred people did to Microsoft.
Can they extend this to Comcast so that I don't have to watch hundreds of self serving ads tell me what a great and innovation company (uh monopoly) they are?
2.7B fine to ensure that Google will route your shopping click to search vendors making millions off from affiliate kickbacks. That's why these shopping search vendors are mad, it isn't the advertising revenue, it the up to 10% affiliate kickbacks they want. And you're a fool if you think stores paying large affiliate kickbacks have the lowest prices.
What a mess now there is a third licensing pool for h.265...
http://blog.streamingmedia.com...
The patent situation on h.265 is a total mess. Why even bother with it?
This is very different. This case is about the EU trying to suppress search results on Google's servers located in the USA. Google is already suppressing the results on its EU based servers. In the US the First Amendment specifically stop the government from doing something like this. So the EU is trying to get Google to stop doing something in America which is specifically protected in the US Constitution by punishing the EU subsidiaries.
China performs similar censorship. They do it via the Great Firewall. The way China is currently censoring, while unpalatable, it is a reasonable solution under international law.
If the EU enacts this scheme where local subsidiaries are punished to make foreign parts of the company do the EU's bidding, then it won't be long until China starts doing this to foreign companies with Chinese presence. And of course Iran, Myanmar, etc will all pile on too.
If the EU really wants to implement this crazy scheme (which is tilting windmills, like the Brits and porn) then they should build their own version of the Great Firewall and leave the rest of the world alone. Please don't trigger a cascade of these demands into another dozen countries.
The whole approach to this is screwed up. Why is Google in the middle of it? The correct approach is to bring the person complaining and the website hosting into court and come to a decision. If the decision is to prevent listing in search engines, then modify the site's robot.txt to stop any search engine from indexing the page. In the current messed up situation Google has become judge, jury and executer for the decision. In my opinion that is abdication of governmental responsibility. It is the judicial's responsibility to interpret these laws, not some panel of Google employees. Google on'y responsibility should be to respect the directives in the robot.txt.
You are also looking at the pond when the real fight is happening in the ocean. Over the next twenty to thirty years these companies are going to have global logistic networks that work in both directions. Companies in the US will be able to make their wares appear in Chinese websites similar to how Aliexpress works today. Now repeat that model in every country in the world.
So we need to feed our two sharks Amazon/Walmart and then let them loose into the ocean. Remember what Microsoft did to the software industry in the rest of the world during the 80's and 90's?
Over the next few decades the national boundaries of retail are going to disappear. Everyone will be able to sell to anyone via these global store fronts and the big logistics platforms will deliver anything anywhere in two days. You don't really think those fleets of planes Amazon and Alibaba are buying will stay in just one country, right? Alibaba just bought an entire airport in Spain.
Logistics is the key to making a global market place. These companies are going to build massive, world-wide distribution and warehousing systems and wring every last efficiency out of them. At most there will be five competitors at this scale. Two unknowns plus Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba.