[pjc50]

Hmm, maybe it will be fun to go through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_billionaires_b...

- Dyson: actually an innovator! Made many of the same criticisms of the UK lack of tech strategy. Promoted Brexit, which has made the situation worse by erecting barriers to a key UK market.

- Ratcliffe: owns INEOS: oil refineries. Old school engineering? Or just provision of capital?

- Hinduja: purchaser of Ashok Leyland, which became a huge success once unshackled from disastrous management of British Leyland. Counts as "engineering" but not "tech"?

- Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster: classic aristo landlord. Owns large areas of London.

- Platt: hedge funds.

""The reality is that there is no willingness within the Eurozone to share wealth," he said. "In the United States, if California is having a really difficult time, the rest of the United States will send money to California. This is not the case in Europe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Platt_(financier) , perhaps a surprising advocate of redistribution

- Coates: gambling. Counts as "tech startup" (bet365)

- Bamford: heir to JCB, the excavator company. "Engineering". Brexiter, as a result of being sued for antitrust by EU

- Branson: definitely self-made, across a large number of different companies. Space billionaire, closest figure to British Musk.

- Currie: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.

- Reece: also INEOS. Almost no wp bio.

- Cadogan, 8th Earl Cadogan: aristo. Dead.

- Lewis: trader. Like Soros, profited from Black Wednesday. Under arrest in Manhattan.

- Reuben: metals. Seem to have made a killing from 90s Russia.

- Graff: diamonds. Looks like classic self-made from nothing story?

- Calder: Jive records.

- Morris: Home Bargains. Wildly successful discount shopkeeper.

(you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth)

[DaiPlusPlus]

> you know who's NOT on this list? Anyone to do with ARM. Even Hermann Hauser appears to have only £150m net worth)

I wonder if ARM's success, or rather, popularity and market dominanance, is because they (intentionally or otherwise) devalued themselves enough.

[fidotron]

Indeed. You can see in some of the comments here the American mentality simply could not have made ARM successful because they would have been too busy competing with their own customers. For ARM to take off and be trusted they had to knowingly leave valuable profit margins around for their customers to be able to take advantage of.

The defining question is if the world is better off by having people play that game or the one where everyone tries to takeover everything all the time.

[ethbr1]

Microsoft minted many fortunes by leaving valuable profit margins around for third party developers.

It's a longer game, so hopefully ARM employees still own some equity.

[fidotron]

Where are these third party developers that made decent money and Microsoft didn’t subsequently try to eat their piece of the pie?

It is a repeated pattern and people are not stupid. (See also the Sherlock phenomenon with Apple). Valve, for example, have to invest in proton as the ultimate back up plan. For me personally that has proven quite helpful, but your initial business has to be wildly successful for you to be able to play defensive moves like that.

This leads to a situation where mid sized companies are few in number and unstable.

[bemusedthrow75]

> and Microsoft didn’t subsequently try to eat their piece of the pie?

That second part wasn't in the original claim, though. The parent comment is right. Sure, 21st century Microsoft has come for the utilities market, for the Lotus-to-Evernote market, etc., etc., but an entire software industry really did spring up in the eighties through to the early 2000s filling gaps in Microsoft software.

[ethbr1]

Oracle, SAP, Adobe, VMware, Intuit, AutoDesk, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, just to list a few still surviving companies.

Microsoft absolutely expands into areas it considers strategic profit or capability centers. E.g. office productivity, web browser, database, gaming, etc.

But they, and especially early/smaller Microsoft (90s-00s), left a ton of money on the table for the good of the platform. Because they realized they couldn't do it all and be best-of-everything.

The fact that Microsoft can deploy its level of resources (e.g. crush Lotus) when they decide to doesn't mean that they always decide to.

[bemusedthrow75]

> For ARM to take off and be trusted they had to knowingly leave valuable profit margins around for their customers to be able to take advantage of.

Exactly this.

[londons_explore]

Indeed - they appear to be great engineers and terrible business-people.

They have collected very little profit from their market-dominating IP.

[bemusedthrow75]

They aren't terrible business people at all!

If they collected much more profit from each device sale then they wouldn't have market-dominating IP. Because they'd have competitors who could undercut them.

As it is, a tiny firm of people make an extremely good living off a margin that nobody in the business can really quibble with, and it has without conflict sustained them to do greater and greater work that has changed the world.

You watch: ARM post-IPO will inevitably have to start squeezing more juice out of the market to give to greedier, more transactional, more activist shareholders, and this will fuck up the balance entirely.

An ARM IPO isn't really going to be good for anyone, I think.

[hnhg]

I would be surprised if many Brits know of ARM as a British success story. Ditto for Raspberry Pi or Deepmind. These things are just not celebrated, it seems.

[pjc50]

If you ask people in the street to name a famous living British technologist, they might come up with Tim Berners-Lee or James Dyson, but they are never going to name Sophie Wilson.

(I wonder what answers you would get?)

[bemusedthrow75]

It is upsetting to me but you are right, they'd know Dyson. (I wish they would instead know the name Chris Duncan, the inventor of the Henry vacuum cleaner and while still a Brexiteer, a man who hasn't subsequently kicked dirt in the eye of the UK).

They wouldn't remember Tim Berners-Lee's actual name but they would be able to say, the web guy. (Which is probably better for him when he goes shopping).

[pjc50]

TBL was in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony!

But yes, few people who actually _build_ things, get to be famous public figures. Possibly due to being too busy to engage with the media nonsense or even worse social media nonsense.

[bemusedthrow75]

He was indeed :-) But I suspect more people could recognise his charming unassuming face than remember his actual name.

[frutiger]

Alan Turing (on the £5 note) and Isambard Kingdom Brunel maybe?

[michaelt]

Alas pjc50 specified living British technologists.

I mean, Britain has many great technologists if you're willing to count the likes of Arkwright (died 1792), Babbage (died 1871), Watt (died 1819), Faraday (died 1867), Randall (died 1984), Bell (died 1922), Harrison (died 1776), Logie Baird (died 1946), Stephenson (died 1848) etc

But some would say if a country's list of technology greats has so many dead people on it, perhaps that country's glory days are over.

[extraduder_ire]

£50 pound note, william churchill is the one on the £5 note.

This is burned into my brain. because I heard a joke when the redesign came out about him going from not being accepted by his country to not being accepted in Lidl. (£50 notes are often refused in the UK for fear of counterfeit.)

[pjc50]

Yes - hence the more interesting qualifier "living"

[bemusedthrow75]

A decent number of Brits know about the Raspberry Pi, but it is true to say that a hell of a lot more know what the BBC micro:bit is.

None of them would recognise Eben Upton (except as Jason Statham)