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by DaiPlusPlus 1034 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
fidotron 1034 days ago
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.

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ethbr1 1034 days ago
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.

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fidotron 1034 days ago
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.

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bemusedthrow75 1034 days ago
> 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.

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ethbr1 1034 days ago
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.

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fidotron 1034 days ago
> Oracle, SAP, Adobe, VMware, Intuit, AutoDesk, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Electronic Arts

SQL Server, Dynamics, TrueType/Silverlight, Hyper-V, Microsoft Money, Softimage was owned by MS, Activision are in the process of being bought by MS, Epic and EA both compete with MS.

In the case of the above Microsoft has tried to compete with, kill, or acquire all of them. That's using others to do the hard work of market discovery.

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bemusedthrow75 1034 days ago
> 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.

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londons_explore 1034 days ago
Indeed - they appear to be great engineers and terrible business-people.

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

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bemusedthrow75 1034 days ago
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.

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