[AndrewKemendo]

I think most people overlook the intelligence value that GAFAM + Tencent have over nearly every other company on the planet. I don't know of any company out there that doesn't use one or more services from these companies which means you're giving them business intelligence about your activities even if you never talk with one of their BD/CD people.

And make no mistake that business intelligence is absolutely one of the most important things a big company (or nation) can have from a defensibly perspective.

Speaking as a former spy it's a spy agency's dream to have the kind of data on possible competitors and collaborators that these groups have. Individually they can see every threat coming a mile away and then decide to ignore, buy, invest.

This is why I think "this time is different" from a disruption cycle perspective. Never in history have companies had so much intelligence on their competitors and collaborators and actively used it to disrupt themselves - multiple times. Don't get me wrong, companies have always done this, but never at this level of granularity and specificity so quickly.

[TheBiv]

>>"...and then decide to ignore, buy, invest."

...and then decide to ignore, buy, invest or copy.

[AndrewKemendo]

True, though history seems to show that copy only happens after they aren't able to buy or invest. It's much riskier from a business perspective to copy than to buy usually.

[finnh]

Only for really big things like Instagram that have a network effect helping them, and as such threaten the incumbent.

For smaller features / ideas, it's much less risky to copy than to buy a company (for, say, 10-100M) and hope the acquisition goes well. Most acquisitions don't go all that well.

[TheBiv]

Very good point! Thank you for the greater sense of context, as I wasn't trying to imply that Facebook was a bad actor for copying.

[ThrustVectoring]

I'm honestly surprised that these companies haven't started extracting business intelligence information from their data flows and using it to make investment decisions in public companies. Surely there's a correlation between how often people search for "JC Penny" and JC Penny's earnings. And these companies have far more data than that, alongside a giant pile of money that they can use to fund an investment arm.

[AndrewKemendo]

Unfortunately it's illegal to do so because it's trading on non-public information. Sergey suggested it long ago but Eric killed it immediately.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1789358