Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

[Gaessaki]

For the average person, it’s hard to imagine a world where the GAMA are not so utterly dominant. However, there’s clearly a precedent of “nothing lasts for ever” in tech with former incumbents such as IBM, Intel, Yahoo, AOL, Oracle, to a certain extent Microsoft, and many others losing their grip of their quasi-monopolistic market positions. Do you see a near future where today’s GAMA shuffle to become a different acronym (or doing away with big 4 acronyms altogether)? If so, what are the events that will lead up to it and who will be the first to go?

Note, not arguing that they should be taken down a notch necessarily, but rather more interested in the economic arguments of whether it’s possible or even likely.

[PaulHoule]

It’s already happened to Facebook. Zuckerberg would love to trade his company for TikTok and their version of the ‘metaverse’ is cruelly mocked in all corners.

Amazon is slipping. In the last two years they quit delivering Prime packages in two days in much of the US. Most other retailers have sped up their deliveries in this time frame. Customers are starting to notice. Everything AMZN has pioneered is now widespread in business. For instance AWS was fresh once but Azure is a peer.

Netflix is just another movie studio no.

[pipeline_peak]

Amazon is not slipping, they are by far the largest online delivery service and marketplace. Not to mention ever growing brand names and overall dominance. Azure has always been a peer.

Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted, I wish Amazon would break apart, but that's far from the case.

[PaulHoule]

Amazon is big but it is not the best.

Their momentum is going to work against them in the long term. Somebody who is in the Prime habit is going to order 20 items from Amazon waiting 4-7 days each time.

Someday they're going to buy something from another retailer like Adorama or Best Buy or Target or Walmart and get it the next day and say... Wow!

Amazon has the considerable advantage of having a larger catalog but who knows what fragment of the catalog is a scam.

[pipeline_peak]

It's not about being the best, prime performance, or the minority of people doing the homework to notice they're ripped off. There's no retailer who isn't failing to give you the best price. A lot of shoppers don't even use prime, as long as they get that free delivery, they'll wait a few days. The majority of people are buying from them as they grow into a larger internet monopoly. They've been invested in online delivery for a long time, so strongly that even Walmart can't compete.

Out of all the retailers you listed, Walmart is the only close competitor in terms of delivery, Best Buy still has tech, but not much outside.

[ActorNightly]

Just a reminder to anyone reading - don't trust anyones predictions about economy without seeing their current stock/option positions. If someone is so sure that the company is going to fail, it would be a no brainer for them to short the stock or buy put options.

[harambae]

> If someone is so sure that the company is going to fail, it would be a no brainer for them to short the stock or buy put options.

They still have to be confident it will do so within a relatively narrow time frame in which the options premium or short interest makes it worthwhile. (I knew housing sales were going to slow down and bought put options against Whirlpool at 200... but I was off by a few months and still lost.)

[vmoore]

> the ‘metaverse’ is cruelly mocked in all corners

The Metaverse thing is just a passion project. It's what you invent when the initial vision of your main gig (Facebook) starts going down the doldrums. Facebook is basically in maintenance mode now.

[PaulHoule]

It's worse than that. They changed the name of the company to "Meta" because they want you to forget about Facebook.

[throwayyy479087]

No you can't just trust the market to regulate - that's capitalist propaganda.

The government must intervene.

[rowanG077]

I'm not sure what your point is. Just because these companies aren't eternal doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate them. I'd wager most people would be fantastically happy if browser tracking and personalized ads/content were illegal.

[mikewarot]

Nobody has yet implemented the Memex proposed by Bush in 1945.[1] In it, hyperlinked documents were stored in a massive LOCAL library, and could be shared in context at will.

Local storage of data removes the tracking information you supply to enable advertising, and give them profits at your expense.

It would drive the copyright rentier class (Disney et al) nuts, but could also be quite handy to have in the coming wave of DeGlobalization and supply chain restructuring.

The editor of the Atlantic in his introduction said "The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work." Yet here we are, 70+ years later with that vision unfulfilled.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

[mixedCase]

So... IPFS, Torrents, eDonkey/Kad, Tor, I2P, what is missing between those?

[mikewarot]

Local storage of everything. A language for the markup of hypertext documents (no, HTML doesn't do that). A strategy for recording an annotative trail.

[mixedCase]

All of those allow local storage. They in fact assume it.

> A language for the markup of hypertext documents (no, HTML doesn't do that)

What is missing? Specially when accounting for anchor links being able to target protocols other than HTTPs.

> A strategy for recording an annotative trail

Could you go into descriptive detail of what you actually mean here?

[mikewarot]

If I have a document, you can't annotate it without embedding new code in the document... you can't add a layer of markup on top of, and separate from, it.

The decision to embed markup in documents was horrible in its effects. It gives copyright holders extortive power over criticism, for example. You have to copy a document to mark it up, which didn't need to be the case.

As for annotative trail... imagine being able to lay out a set of pages of paper on a larger white sheet... and then make notes between two things showing how they are logically associated, in context. HTML links are blind, unidirectional, fragile, and can't go to an arbitrary position in a document.

[mixedCase]

Sorry but the first part you wrote doesn't make much sense. To the best of my understanding, you're just saying that you want diffs to be stored instead of a full copy of a document?

If the whole point is to skirt around broken legislation/executive power not enforcing fair use as it should you've already lost on the fact alone that courts can interpret your layering as infringement; courts around the world have previously rule linking to be infringement as-is. But if you believe that'll actually solve things you could easily build an extension that layers HTML patches on top of another base HTML via XPath "coordinates". Of course I'm sure you've realized that if your base HTML is hosted by a hostile entity, good luck keeping it up to date with their modifications, and that's not limited to HTML as it would be a an issue regardless of whatever system you come up with and expect "the bad guys" to adopt. You either have copies, which means hosting copyrighted material, or you have references, which can go out of date.

> HTML links are blind, unidirectional, fragile, and can't go to an arbitrary position in a document.

Blind/unidirectional is fixed at the client level (e.g. the back button, history, you could do something like what this extension did if you want trees: https://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/09/display-firefox-browsing-h...). It doesn't make the slightest bit of technical sense to track backlinks on every hosted document because the incentives don't align and you'd be wasting a whole lot of space. You could have a separate service store this in a graph much like a web crawler. Don't need to reinvent HTML for that.

Fragile, you fix with copies. You can't force people to host an immutable record forever and yes this is abusable by copyright trolls, again, can't fix the law with tech.

As for linking to an arbitrary direction, you can href to a an ID and that's good enough a lot of the time. If you want any more than that you don't have to re-invent HTML: you just have to extend it with support for XPath targets. And that's something you can easily do with a browser extension all while keeping it fully backwards compatible with the web.

[pdimitar]

The ability to trace back is way too easy to achieve for bullies (publisher mafia, copyright holders, state agencies with geopolitical interests etc).

Stuff like NNCP might help.

The complete lack of interest in developing a truly anonymous internet is worrying.

Another thing that is sorely missing is the ease of use of the web-of-trust networks. Me and a friend on the other side of the globe meet up physically, exchange keys, then put them in our routers / home servers and suddenly we have access to each other's NAS and local networks, for example.

For now, nobody is working seriously on nothing like that. That's not good at all.

[mixedCase]

I named both Tor and I2P.

As for your web-of-trust thing, what's missing from a VPN solution?

[pdimitar]

Full anonymity from everyone along the way.

I got nothing to hide yet I dislike the idea of my traffic being analyzed.

VPN is just from point A (me) to point B (VPN node) to point C (actual destination). A lot of ISPs recognize and profile VPN traffic, even if they can't decipher it. So hardly an actual improvement.

Tor + torrent + deliberate traffic pattern/origin obfuscation is likely where it's at but as I said, nobody made a true full solution.

[mixedCase]

If you want full anonymity performance be damned you can run your VPN over Tor. But I gotta ask, what is the problem with your ISP recognizing that you're using a VPN? Everyone is using VPNs nowadays.

If your concern is that they'd know who you are connecting to, you can use another VPN you trust more than your ISP as a middle-man.

If you trust no-one but your friend, I'd recommend running your own fiber to your friend's house, but people could just see where it leads to, so what you're looking after that is to invent quantum-entangled network cards and pick up your Turing award and possibly Nobel on your way out. If that seems out of reach, I can't see how to solve this with technology.

[afarrell]

Who will be willing to pay for it?

[mikewarot]

It's just a program, there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software.

As for how would development be funded, a group effort, open source.

[cruano]

> there's no real cost to manufacture and distribute software

Do you know where you are writing this? God, even if you managed to find people that are willing to sacrifice their >$100K/year for a good cause, "local storage" has both a start and a maintenance cost, especially "massive" ones.

And copyright is a legal issue, not a technological one

[mikewarot]

>Do you know where you are writing this?

Yes, in a community of people with a bent towards making things to scratch an itch. Some of them are highly in favor of monetizing those things, but yet not all, and we have been known to favor open source projects from time to time.

[jstx1]

> IBM, Intel, Yahoo, AOL, Oracle, to a certain extent Microsoft(...) Do you see a near future where today’s FAANG shuffle to become a different acronym

By market cap the six largest US tech companies are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla and Meta (in that order). Netflix is number 71 on the list (of all companies, not just tech); it's smaller than Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce etc.

'FAANG' catching on as an acronym doesn't say all that much about these companies as a group.

[Gaessaki]

I could include another dozen or companies that I would target in this question. FAANG is simply a stand-in. I guess we could go with GAMA instead.

[cutierust]

I bet Paul Graham created that acronym

[jstx1]

It was Jim Cramer - FANG (without Apple) were 4 stocks that he liked back in 2013 and it kind of caught on and evolved from there.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

It never/always will.

The acronyms are ever changing when you expand the scope to other industries and historical time periods. Big 5 Hollywood Studios of the 40’s, Robber Barons, Rockefellers, Telecoms of the 90’s are just a few that come to my mind without reaching for sources. But you could probably look back further at Rothschilds and the trade companies responsible for colonization and slave trade even. Anywhere, where disembodied capital seeks to maximize profits.

We’ve been here already, and we will again. Not much more than 15 years ago all of the companies in the GAMA acronym were companies we were mostly rooting for. Now they’re the “big ones.”

I don’t think there will ever be a single threshold moment to witness. Some of them will fade in or out, others will abruptly merge or splinter. They’re really just temporary holographic systems of meanings. The people, the talent, the product and capital move around dynamically.

[GianFabien]

I'm not an economist, just some random techie.

I don't think you can lump all of GAMA together. I think that Meta and Twitter which rely almost entirely on advertising revenue are the most vulnerable. Google with some products and Apple with several products should be less vulnerable. Amazon covers several niches: distributor, advertiser, web services, so they are probably facing numerous challenges in the future.

If the headwinds in the near future intensify, then I suspect that advertising spending will reduce and thus any business that sustains itself purely on advertising revenue will have serious problems.

[mtberatwork]

What headwinds? The Western world is a consumption driven society (with the US being an extreme version I would say), so I don't think advertising/PR spending will be reduced, just transferred from one focus to another. The businesses that are driven by ad revenues will pivot to wherever the ad dollars go.

[jmoak3]

>so I don't think advertising/PR spending will be reduced

I disagree, if consumer spending is reduced due to less equity valuations or less overall liquidity, then the ad spend will follow.

A recession could easily bring this about.

[crazygringo]

I would say not likely. As industries mature, incumbents acquire enough of an advantage that they don't get outcompeted, you just want until the market for their product disappears.

It's like asking if Coca-Cola, Nabisco, or Unilever are going to get "taken down a notch". No, not really. Also "take down a notch" is some pretty judgmental phrasing, as if it implies they're bigger than they deserve to be, as if they're doing something wrong.

Google owns search, Amazon owns retailing, Microsoft owns enterprise, and Apple owns hardware. Every market has a runner-up as well in terms of profitability (arguably Bing, Wal-Mart, Google Cloud, Dell respectively), but that's in the same way Pepsi is the eternal runner-up to Coca-Cola.

These markets are pretty mature now, in ways that they weren't in the days of Yahoo and AOL. In contrast, IBM was dominant for decades and only declined as eventually consumer PC's disrupted mainframes. So really you'd have to ask, what could ever fundamentally disrupt/replace search, online shopping, office software suites, or phones/laptops? It's pretty hard to imagine until something like generalized artificial intelligence comes along.

[tmpz22]

> Google owns search,

And Youtube and Chrome and Android and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning via their massive data hoard

> Amazon owns retailing

And Cloud and Whole Foods and more

> Microsoft owns enterprise

And Github and VSCode and EA, Bethesda/Zenimax/Xbox game studios (Obsidian etc), and Blizzard/Activision

> Apple owns hardware

And is making a huge push into Ads, and Music, they also control their hardware at an extreme level via iOS, the App Store, etc.

---

These are mega-corporations that are expanding to the overall detriment of society.

[Gaessaki]

Didn't mean to imply that they were necessarily doing anything wrong or right (and I tried to clarify that with the last sentence of my post).

In my book, "taking down a notch" means to humble someone. Companies like Apple and Google can make uniliteral decisions that move markets (for better or for worse), in a way that other companies can't. The crux of the question is whether they'll be able to hold onto this liberty.

On the same vein, I think it's totally fair to ask whether a non-tech company like Nestlé could be taken down a notch.

All that being said, I buy your point. As long as their core offerings remain undisrupted/maintained, it's hard to envision things being different.

[mejutoco]

> It's like asking if Coca-Cola, Nabisco, or Unilever are going to get "taken down a notch". No, not really.

Coca-cola, and some of Unilever products (like Kraft cheese or Heinz ketchup) don't look great in some markets where health is a major selling point of food products and a lot of smaller competitors are coming up.

IMHO they are past their peak but, of course, they will survive for a long time.

[strikelaserclaw]

father time erodes everything. These companies really start eroding when the people who built the company die, and then you get a lot of politics and bureaucracy.

[Fradow]

One possible future is that the increasing pressure to have data out of reach of the US under the Patriot Act will lead to powerful competitors outside the US, starting from domestic market and then expanding internationally.

It's already well under way in China, where US big tech isn't as prevalent and one big example of this is Aliexpress, which is known outside of China borders. Russia is known for having local competitors as well.

The biggest push though is currently the GDPR, which makes it illegal to handle EU citizens data in a way that allows the US to access it. While enforcement is super slow and non-compliance very very high, it's slowly having an impact, where EU businesses now try harder to choose EU providers to avoid that non-compliance.

While I don't know of a specific success-story to point out right now, I think there are good odds there will be some in the long term.

Note that I only talk about GDPR because I'm European, but there are similar initiatives in other countries around the world. I heard about Brazil LGPD for example.