[olefoo]

And once again the tech workforce wakes up in the gutter wearing clown makeup and wondering what happened.

In a functioning economic regulatory environment the whole "Spend big money upfront to Capture & Control $MARKET" game would have been illegal from the get go. We would have had a much greater variety of companies and a much greater variety of size of companies. But, hey. Here we are. In the gutter. Covered in slapstick.

[achillesheels]

By your reasoning Intel would have never been created. QED.

[Apocryphon]

Who's to say that wouldn't have been a better world, technologically speaking? Who's to say Intel's market dominance was a good thing? I thought it was a truism in tech that monocultures are a bad thing?

[Nasrudith]

For better or worse economies of scale with increasingly large upfront costs and low unit cost are what sustainably drive dominance and thus lead to a "monoculture" as a better strategy until they squander it sufficiently to be overtaken.

The truism is a bit off as well given the difference between "defacto standard" and "monoculture".

Of course not all monocultures are equal as well - commerical monopoly vertical intergrated, horizontal like ARM style designs made by others, open standards used by all, etc.

[achillesheels]

I think the more pertinent focus is to ask: was Intel created naturally or artificially? To that, we must look at its effects on human civilization, including the compounding network effects on the Valley. I see its merits as natural and therefore, per Aristotle, necessary. So I can't consider a parallel universe where Intel is not a wealth creation signal which causes the venture capital industry to grow to the point where now every cosmopolis has some sort of VC Fund.

[Apocryphon]

It's easy to get sucked into counterfactuals, which are fun hypotheticals but sort of useless in debate. Yet one has to consider- if Intel was never created, wouldn't someone else simply have invented the microprocessor technologies they created? Were there not competitors? It seems inevitable.

[achillesheels]

I remember from a Nova special that TI was actually right there with the planar lithographic technique. And yes, I am also of the position that their R&D was really more like "intrinsic value exploration" - microprocessors being an inevitable necessity for advancing the state of the art of human civilization, so there is a first mover advantage. But this is where "risk-taking" is so underrated, even in a "swingin' dick" American culture, there aren't many of those types in EE departments and Bell Labs!

So, while I would argue it was practical necessity to mass fabricate central signal processing units, gunning for that opportunity would be reserved for a self-selected population pool, which Nature has determined to be those already opting to be mavericks when launching Shockley Semiconductor.