[jacquesm]

There is something self-defeating about large tech companies. I wonder if this is fixable or if it is something that we simply have to accept. I don't know of a single large tech company that managed to keep their engineering spirit alive over the longer term, eventually all of them (even HP!) lose their way and end up being run in short-term, short-sighted mode which more or less kills them, even though they can stick around for many years afterwards on momentum alone.

[windexh8er]

I've been around a number of silicon valley organizations now, from large (30k+) to small (employee # 58). I've seen some good and a lot of bad over the years now - but it all seems to stem from one place: the sales organization. Now I'm not saying all sales organizations are bad, but in fact they do seem to follow the many of the stereotypes they've been cast into over the years.

Watching some of Intel's recent events seem to be driven by sales and marketing in a very tone-deaf manner. It's almost always been the case, in my experience, that sales leaders don't see competition. They continually talk about how what they represent is the best and you can't have a lucid conversation with most of them because they don't fundamentally understand what may make the competition better, or even fundamentals of their own product. It's black and white and many seem to just go all in on FUD to a ridiculous level, when forced.

When executives are far more focused on what wall street thinks than what their own customers want you know that the cancer runs deep. I continuously hear things like "our customers want a subscription model for our software because it's more flexible and is often cheaper!". Neither is, generally, true when it's being broadcast like that. It's a dark pattern (most notably in enterprise software / hardware) for a company to pull in long term revenue on a product that is, potentially, not evolving fast enough to warrant customers wanting to pay for an upgrade or new version. And a lot of SaaS just to "SaaSify" something, even though the customer could very well run it themselves, where they'd like, and be far better off.

It's just frustrating to have been in the industry as over 20 years now and to see even less inspiring, less charismatic and ignorant people continually failing up and driving companies down. I know C-levels that have lied, cheated and been fired for the former - yet they continue to land better positions, somehow? Some days it's beyond maddening to watch. But more often than not these folks are in some way, shape or form tied to the overarching sales machine.

[ethbr0]

Sales and consulting are two sides of the same coin.

Both bring in revenue, but neither creates product.

If you have leadership that allocates resources to boost revenue, without an understanding of why customers are paying, more and more resources and power accrue to sales and consulting departments. Eventually, this kills the company.

Above anything else, the lack of a distinct and political sales and/or consulting org is what makes startups startups. Most of the people fulfilling those roles are dual-hatted elsewhere, or at least sit close enough to people who are that they have a more holistic view.

[N1H1L]

A world without McKinsey will probably be a better world.

[jacquesm]

These grafted on SaaS models are a particular pain in the behind.

[nicoburns]

> There is something self-defeating about large tech companies.

If you remove "tech" from this sentence I think it's still true, and it points you towards the solution: bias the economy towards small companies (for example, via progressive corporation tax). There's a bit of nuance here: I think a lot of the problem is with public companies. So we could probably do a lot by reforming the public ownership system.

[GDC7]

It's not even companies. It's people! As they progress they become more risk averse and are terrified by the idea of losing their wealth.

That's why we have entire sectors of the economy focused on wealth preservation without volatility.

These people want a stable and steady climb upwards.

I think it's because there is an alarming lack of arrogance and self-confidence in the world. It's visible in every possible datapoint . People say those things are bad, but in reality they keep the system honest.

The best way to redistribute wealth is wealthy individuals overplaying their hand. It doesn't ever happen, there is something deeply wrong in Bill Gates being at the top of the Forbes rich list for 30 years.

His brain should have adapted to the new normal and compelled him to risk his whole fortune in the hope of making even more money, maybe becoming the first trillionarie. That's how wealth is redistributed; rich people becoming greedy and overplaying their hand.

It doesn't happen, rich people are happy being at the top and they are not ambitious enough to reach for the impossible milestones.

The only nut out there who does it is Musk but his wealth is not real yet, it's paper wealth.

We'll see how Bezos decides to go about it.

[nicoburns]

> His brain should have adapted to the new normal and compelled him to risk his whole fortune in the hope of making even more money

Why do you think this should happen? That doesn't sound very rational to me. If you have more than you could possibly ever need then why would you choose to risk that? This is one reason why we should never reward people with these ridiculous levels of wealth in the first place.

> The best way to redistribute wealth is wealthy individuals overplaying their hand.

This sounds like a very wasteful and unreliable way to redistribute wealth to me. Unreliable because as you say it often doesn't happen. Wasteful because if it does happen it involves wasting enormous amounts of resources on a failed project.

IMO the best way to redistribute wealth is to not allow people to become as ridiculously wealthy as they are in the first place.

[GDC7]

> If you have more than you could possibly ever need then why would you choose to risk that?

Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

Bill Gates biggest wins happened in the late 80s and 90s.

His brain should compel him to do better than that to release those elusive juices once again.

The only way to do so is having even bigger wins than the ones in the 80s and 90s

> Failed project

The entrepreneur's failed project is the worker dream job where you get paid for doing nothing.

Kinda like the influencers hired by Bloomberg in his 2020 campaign. Nobody was checking if they were really doing the job and they just pocketed the money.

[nicoburns]

> Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

Well sure, but those motivations exist regardless of any financial rewards. We are talking here about the additional effect of financial incentives. IMO the possibility of making say $1m or $10m is pretty motivating if you don't have much. But once you reach say $1B, financial incentives are unlikely to be as relevant to you. You're made for life, why should you do anything you don't want to do.

> the worker dream job where you get paid for doing nothing.

I think most workers would prefer to be paid to something useful/meaningful, unless they can literally go and do something completely different with no restrictions. But is rarely how billionaire's failed projects go. They usually involve a lot of people working very hard to no end.

[GDC7]

> Well sure, but those motivations exist regardless of any financial rewards

The amount of the financial reward measures how much you are winning. The juices produced when you win 20$ and those produced when your leveraged long in biotech stocks make you 750k are not the same.

> They usually involve a lot of people working very hard to no end.

This is just a pessimistic outlook. Most stuff fails but the few thing that stick produce a big improvement.

And it's not just billionaires who face this problem. Government has an even worse success rate, but the home runs are paradigm shifts. The failures burn a lot, think about the CERN failure, that's 20B right there.

The ITER fusion seems to be the same thing and that's 50B

The ISS never recovered the initial investment made, that's 100B.

It's not just billionaires projects wasting money

[majormajor]

> Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

You say this, but you point at evidence saying the opposite.

[GDC7]

And in fact, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Waltons and all the people who have been populating the Forbes rich list for the last 30 years...they don't look happy.

They seem rather dull and desensitised to anything. Very robotic.

Very similar to the British royals and European old money.

They live in fear of losing their money and relevance instead of having the confidence to double down on their bets and hit yet another home run.

If you look at billionaires then it's pretty easy to pick the ones you'd want to be: Mark Cuban, Donald Trump, Rihanna, Cristiano Ronaldo....etc

Those type of billionaries who are big spenders and also continiously betting on themselves are the type of billionaires also good for society because they make the economy go around and their projects are cash cows for other entrepreneurs looking for easy oversells.

Can't imagine living in fear like Gates, the Waltons and Warren Buffett, they aren't human.

[inshadows]

> This is one reason why we should never reward people with these ridiculous levels of wealth in the first place.

Who are we and why do "we" do that?

[nicoburns]

"we" are society deciding on an economic system and taxation regime.

"we" currently reward people with this amount of wealth generally because of a majority belief in one or more of the following (none of which are true in my opinion):

  (1) They deserve this money, because either:
    (1a) it represents a proportional reward for work put in
    (1b) any money gained under a market system are deserved/earnt, and taxing those earnings is stealing

  (2) That rewarding people in this manner (without limits) is the only way to motivate people to work hard, and that this ultimately produces better outcomes than distributing our economic output more evenly

[inshadows]

Are you absolutely sure that you and Bill Gates live under the same economic system? Because I suspect that you describe some other economic system than capitalism.

[WJW]

There are definitely benefits to having large companies as well, though. Economies of scale are a real thing for one, and especially in the semiconductor industry the price of modern production facilities (>20 bn per fab) is well outside the reach of any company you could still call "small".

[nicoburns]

There are, but even in these cases there are economic downsides: notably with semi-conductors, risk if any of these big companies fail. I think that if the benefit of scale is so great, then you should be able to prove it by withstanding the higher tax burden.

[TulliusCicero]

I think it's that successful momentum can paper over internal business failures for a while, which means you lose a sort of natural selection where the worse employees -- and especially the worse managers -- would screw up in an obvious way and get booted out. And without that pressure around, people don't have to perform.

Basically, a company that's in an extremely strong position from prior successes may lose internal feedback loops that kept the people and culture on track.

[kbenson]

Perhaps we need to be more aggressive with laws encouraging competition (or more accurately discouraging leaders of a market from getting too large a lead). It really does seem to be better for most involved (except for those that want to capitalize on enough success for short term greed that destroys momentum and talent pools).

What that actually means in a situation like this, where technology and production pipelines are years long and a misstep can set you back a decade or more (like it did for AMD, and like it's doing now for Intel), I don't know. I do know it sure seems like markets with at least three major players are more healthy than those with two, as we keep seeing again and again (iOS and Android being another recent example, if exhibiting a different problem).

[burnished]

The skills that make you successful at producing a product (the various types of engineering, product design, marketing, process analysis, manufacturing, the real work essentially) in the first place are not the same skills that make you successful in a corporate organization as an individual (politicking). As time moves on and a company becomes a money-printing machine because the 'real work' has already largely been performed the organization becomes host to parasites, or I guess you can just call them people that are better and better at extracting personal value even at the expense of group well being. I think its sort of inevitable due to finite human lifespans and non-transferable skillsets.

[apohn]

>There is something self-defeating about large tech companies.

It's all large companies. They think they are too big and entrenched to fail.

I've worked for 2 large non-tech companies where managers and leaders loved to say "We are X. We have the resources to do anything. If we apply ourselves, we are unstoppable." One of those companies tried to enter a new market and failed miserably because they kept trying to tell customers what they wanted instead of listening to their customers. The other company is a classic example of what people talk about when they make fun of "too big to fail" companies.

[malandrew]

> "We are X. We have the resources to do anything."

Management will say this and in the next breath say that we either don't have headcount to alleviate an understaffed team or we don't have budget to retain some amazing engineer that they want to see how long they can underpay before they leave. I've lost track of the number of times I've told management about how import it is to retain certain individuals and how they absolutely should make sure those people are happy with everything within management's control, and then they ignored those warnings and then the talent left. These losses happen slowly and then suddenly when enough of the remaining talent looks around and realize that most of the good engineers have abandoned ship.

[ethbr0]

In good companies I've worked for, there was optimistic realism. "We hear that we need X, but we can't afford that right now. Could we Y?"

Admitting you have a problem, first step, etc.

[xyzzy21]

It's mostly NOT fixable.

The problem comes from the sociological fact that groups differ from individuals in serious cognitive, sociological, moral and motivational ways.

And as a general rule, groups of people DO NOT SCALE WITH SIZE.

This is the fundamental reality that has been shown to limit the size of companies: the ability to reliably transmit critical operating information from one side to the other as needed fails with increasing size.

And computers do NOT improve things because it's actually a specific type of information required: knowledge applied with skill in a timely fashion. That is what fails with size.

Related to this is the inevitably "Chinese Whispers" losses that arise as the organization grows vertically and as decision making is centralized: the knowledge about the markets served inevitably goes 180 degrees out of phase where every direction and decision becomes exactly the wrong or worst possible. The system starts to tear itself apart destroying its competitive abilities and opening up large swaths of market for smaller competitors to take and occupy.

The real world has more information in it than what any planning or system can describe accurately enough to use for predictions. So without accurate feedback from the outside reality, the corporation will fail.

Big tech components can only be "fixed" by breaking themselves apart so they can regain the proper feedback loop accuracy, or by doing what HP USED TO DO: pushing down decision-making to the lowest possible level in a Federated form. This isn't perfect either but it's better than a Top-Down command-and-control system when it comes to performance and competitive fit.

Control-freak executives always screw both of these up because they can't handle letting go.

[krona]

Louis Gerstner (ex. IBM CEO who transformed the company in the 90's) called it 'success syndrome': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cHVgA2tgWI

[dralley]

Louis Gerstner laid a lot of the groundwork for IBM's undoing, himself.

[krona]

Some of the worst aspects of IBM's internal dysfunction survived Gerstner, even though he claimed to had fix them. It's hard to blame him personally, he's just one person. The important point is he perfectly identified the problems, which I find amazing considering most corporate CEO's don't have a clue about how their companies are actually operating.

disclaimer: ex-IBM.

[dralley]

I'm curious how you feel about this analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4b1D1vWRnc

[moedersmooiste]

My guess would be that it's the fate of all publicly listed companies. They tend to focus on short term shareholder value. A lot of family owned companies focus more on the long term.

[choikwa]

Apple?

[jacquesm]

Fair enough, but they had gone down quite far down that exact same road before Jobs came back and their current trajectory is a replay. It's a consumer gadgets company now, and one that hasn't really innovated in the last couple of years.

[simonh]

I'm sorry, the transition to their own silicon, and the tour de force that is the M1 doesn't count as innovation? What would count? We're literally discussing the failures of an iconic chip design firm, so it's particularly ironic that you would overlook this.

[jacquesm]

You mean like IBM is innovating when they use their own silicon? This is just vertical integration at its best, I'm not sure that M1 is a 'tour de force', to me it's just another CPU that was tailored for a specific niche.

The first ARM, that was a tour de force. The 6809 was too, and of course the 4004. But most other CPUs to me are run of the mill and the M1 is in that sense to me nothing special though of course it will give Apple a bit of an edge, but when all is said and done it's just another ARM based SoC.

At best it is an optimization, the most interesting part of the M1 is the dedicated neural net, and I'm not sure if anybody has already done something with that that the main CPU could not have done.

[jve]

Wow.

Intel is now chasing some design decisions within M1 with Intel Thread Director with different types of cores: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels...

How not M1 is not an Innovation? I'm not claiming M1 is the first CPU to do it, I don't know, but they may have executed it flawlessly. Great performance, great battery life and great silence. If you don't call it innovation, at least call it breakthrough.

[ksec]

>Intel is now chasing some design decisions within M1 with Intel Thread Director with different types of cores:

I have seen this being repeated again and again by DaringFireball, Gurman and many other places. It started with ARM bigLITTLE, not M1.

[dralley]

Nothing M1 did would have had an influence on what Intel is releasing now. The process of designing a chip takes years, a product that is releasing next week will have been functionally design complete a year ago.

[simonh]

IBM does a lot of research into basic chip technology and designs their own chips pushing forward with new architectures and features. Yes, of course they count. It boggles my mind that you think they wouldn't.

[siva7]

The M1 Laptop is currently in many factors miles ahead of its competition for the general consumer market, so calling it just tailored for a specific niche isn't really true.

[jasonlotito]

> and the tour de force that is the M1 doesn't count as innovation?

Not really. You can't buy an M1. It's a part of a bigger product. Is the M1 impressive alone? Or is the MacBook and everything else including the M1 impressive?

And it's not the first chip Apple has done. It's just the first one for a small selection of computers. The M1 a tour de force? No.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

The trajectory doesn’t seem comparable. Apple is the biggest company in the world, makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation), and is still growing at a fast pace. If this is bad, I want to hear what good looks like.

[ben_w]

> makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation)

I like Apple at its best, but I wouldn’t say they’re the best in every (or even nearly every) category they’ve entered.

Yes they have iPhones (top range, even if they have competition from top range Android alternatives), iPads (peerless), Apple Watches (dominant), iPods dominated the MP3 market back when that was a thing anyone cared about…

But they also make really weird mice (Magic Mouse 2: charger on the bottom; many models: one button; Mighty Mouse: scroll nipple; iMac: unergonomic puck), the Apple TV and HomePod are nothing special (the latter is a pity, given I don’t trust their Voice Assistant competitors), and the device power cables have been infamously fragile for a long time.

[jacquesm]

They're doing fine, but I don't see the 'real improvements' over the last couple of generations. The M1 may be such a development, time will tell.

[bayindirh]

Apple is becoming like Bentley (or similar higher-end car manufacturer), where the improvement is not in the feature but in the overall package. In other words, the package you get is the feature.

Some improvements like fit & finish, tolerances, endurance, so on are not visible on paper. Others like battery life and weight are visible on paper. When these combine with the xOS (where x={mac, i, iPad, tv}) ecosystem, whole thing becomes visible or palpable, one may say.

It's not an ubiquitous thing to have in technology space, and only possible with tight integration Apple provides, and strives to keep.

[jonplackett]

You can’t expect breakthrough products like the smartphone every few years. That was decades in the making culturally and technologically.

Doesn’t mean something bad is happening, yet.

[gsinclair]

Isn’t the M1 a significant innovation?

[jacquesm]

Let's wait a couple of years before making that call. It could be, it could be a short-lived edge.

[simonh]

No edge in technology lasts forever, and once a new design is out it's much easier for others to copy. The fact is M1 was a nasty shock to their competition and was the biggest single advance in desktop/laptop CPU performance and power efficiency in a long time. If that doesn't count as innovative, I suspect there's some shifting around of goal posts happening.

[Wowfunhappy]

Not old enough yet, if you count from when they were “reborn” in the 2000s with OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. And you should count from there, because before that they were nearly bankrupt.