| > income inequality is growing to be so massive that its impossible, or at least much harder, to build a business anymore. > If you hit a creative idea and get customers, you're either going to get bought up by the giants or be competing with giants. These two ideas are diametrically opposed. If it's impossible to build a business then you'd expect that their you'd get no offers to buy your company (indicating that it is valued highly) or that entry into new markets would be near-impossible in the first place (like starting a new bank). What you're actually complaining about here is that big companies won't give startups space to build their own little monopolies. That shouldn't be surprising, in fact part of the reason startups are meant to be lean in the first place is to out-manoeuvre and out-compete large bureaucratic organisations. > Even bigger, more established companies like slack or NYT find themselves between a rock and hard place. Look at whats happening with journalism, it's geting wrecked by social, how can they possibly compete? NYT are in a pickle because advertising is a terrible business model in the 21st century and no-one buys newspaper subscriptions any more. They need to find a new way to reap a profit from journalism, preferably one that doesn't result in them turning into Buzzfeed for cheap clicks. (to add a personal opinion here, I think that journalism is likely to be entirely be replaced by citizen journalism and sousveillance, and that this is a leap forward in freedom of information and openness of the truth). > All of the services used by the majority of people have been consolidated by just a few companies. This is terrible for both quality and personal privacy, not to mention pricing. The whole point of market competition is that if one company offering a fungible (and I'd argue software is mostly fungible when it can be easily replicated) product over-prices relative to the market, a competitor will undercut them. Also, the fact that companies like Slack exist is testament to the fact that Microsoft and friends _haven't_ managed to get a stranglehold on the software market. I don't know what world you're living in but the reality is not as grim as you're making out. |
Automation and concentration of power are, however, problems for the modern entrepreneur. If they build a cool app or something and become part of the tech ecosystem that way, then they have decreasing power over their own piece of the pie. They can be banned from the app store, out-SEO'd in a week, locked out from previously accessible user data, banned from an API, etc... Some of this is due to today's fast pace, but another factor is the centralized architecture of modern internet ecosystems.