[HN Gopher] The End of the Beginning (2020)
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The End of the Beginning (2020)
Author : CharlesW
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-03-09 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| JohnFen wrote:
| I wish that I could argue that his utterly depressing view of
| where the industry is going was incorrect.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The problem with comparing to car companies is that there are
| much tighter limits on how much accumulated power can corrupt a
| car company.
|
| Sure, they got too big for their britches and created
| propaganda campaigns against pedestrians. They set up a status
| quo re: the environment that future generations will hate us
| for. But then their ability to be evil hit a plateau. The
| cancer that ought to have killed them dwindled, and for better
| or worse, we collectively said "this is fine". As the head of a
| car company, your paths to god-king-of-the-universe are
| significantly limited at the top end, and therefore so too is
| the extent to which your power turns you into an ineffective
| lump.
|
| Information companies are not so limited. So the cancer that
| comes with being powerful is much more likely to be terminal.
| That is, there's nothing stopping Google from driving their
| user base away by just showing 100% ads and 0% content. They'll
| get worse and worse until we're all throwing money at anybody
| who stands a chance at putting them down.
|
| Just look at Elon Musk, for whom efficacy appears to be
| secondary to simplify being the biggest threat to the status
| quo. That dynamic isn't going away: When he ceases being The
| One another anomaly will emerge.
|
| So sure, it'll get worse before it gets better, but it's not
| going to be permanently worse. Even if we don't shoot them
| first, the bad guys will shoot themselves in the foot
| eventually.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > So sure, it'll get worse before it gets better, but it's
| not going to be permanently worse. Even if we don't shoot
| them first, the bad guys will shoot themselves in the foot
| eventually.
|
| I used to think this way, but I have to admit the last decade
| or two has made me much more pessimistic about this.
|
| There are just too many examples of oligopolies that have
| never stopped being terrible. I think the auto industry is
| one of them, and I suspect the software industry is likely to
| be another one.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| What is depressing about it?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Consolidation of a vibrant industry to just a handful of
| major corporations is a real loss, in my opinion. It's
| depressing in part because it makes avoiding those
| corporations much more difficult or impossible, because it
| makes the industry less vibrant and responsive, and because
| it locks a lot of talented people out.
|
| It's also more than a little dystopian as the corporate
| stranglehold over all of us tightens just a bit more.
| pilarphosol wrote:
| This. And VC doesn't help much, because as soon as you take
| the money you are in a race to become the next overpowered,
| uninspiring behemoth, only with less resources and a low
| chance of a real payoff.
| Juliate wrote:
| Consolidation may not be inevitable, but it did happen on
| so many previous innovation waves (steam, electricity,
| telegraph, telephone, automobile, aviation beginnings were
| full of small, growing, competitive ideas and ventures
| too).
|
| It comes with industrialisation and commodification and
| norms and regulation, so it's not all bad either as it
| consolidates/improves the general quality and availability.
|
| (cue Dire Straits' Telegraph Road)
| schrodinger wrote:
| I don't think that's exactly what the article is stating.
| It'd be really hard for an upstart to build a formidable
| competitor to AWS for example, but that just means that the
| next breakthroughs will be less about infrastructure and
| more about applications (not apps, but different use
| cases). "Innovation, uh, finds a way."
| JohnFen wrote:
| Perhaps I was misled by the article analogizing to the
| auto industry. The auto industry is a great example of
| exactly what I fear is the future of of the software
| industry.
| jen20 wrote:
| I'm not sure sure the auto analogy is very good, either.
|
| Today there is the choice of a large variety of safe,
| efficient and performant car models from insanely low
| prices (once inflation is taken into account), and soon
| there will be a similar range of choice in EVs.
|
| Generally speaking, quality is vastly higher than it has
| been in most lifetimes too - when did you last see a new
| car with rust on it, for example? (A few brands, notably
| Mercedes Benz, produce far worse products than they did
| in the 90s, but they are the exception).
|
| If a wide choice of quality products is the future of the
| software industry, I'd welcome that, since it certainly
| is not the state of it today.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I am certainly not saying there aren't some advantages to
| an oligopoly, as the auto industry illustrates. But I do
| think the disadvantages exceed the advantages by a very
| large margin, even in the auto industry.
|
| For instance, there are aspects of new cars that are
| ubiquitous and I find so objectionable that they prevent
| me from buying one, probably ever. If the market were
| more vibrant, I suspect that I'd have real options aside
| from "I can't have a newer car".
|
| Also, oligopolies don't automatically mean that the
| products are improved. Usually, it's just the opposite.
| jen20 wrote:
| The auto industry isn't really an oligopoly though. Even
| if you restrict to "manufactured in the US" there are
| more options now than there were 30 years ago _because_
| the three big manufactures were making trash, and
| competition did the job it was supposed to.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| The author is forgetting one important thing: innovation. You
| can't really predict what is going to be discovered and utilized
| in the future.
| mettamage wrote:
| ChatGPT feels like a good example, I think 6 months ago that
| those who weren't in the know would be able to predict
| something like that. I know I wouldn't be able to, and I even
| build some small neural nets for fun and read Neural Networks
| and Deep Learning [1]. I am by no means an expert in the field,
| but I know some basics and have programmed in all kinds of
| languages, watched 2 Minute Papers quite a bit and yet I didn't
| see this coming at all.
|
| http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/
| NovaDudely wrote:
| That and stable diffusion. While I am not really excited
| about either technology use in my personal life, I do
| understand what a huge leap they are. They are both things
| that few saw coming in the fashion they did and so quickly.
|
| Yes, it took decades of research to get the foundations made
| and then all just sort of suddenly crystalized into a cogent
| thing.
|
| While there are folks out there who could point back and call
| it now, a lot of them were just throwing mud at the wall
| hoping it would stick. Like Jeremy Rifkins predicting stuff
| like this back in the 90's to put us all out of work by the
| far off year of 2000.
|
| What will be the next big thing? I haven't a clue - few
| people probably do.
| kuharich wrote:
| Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981578
| clobmclob wrote:
| I've been thinking this for a while now. But I don't think that
| means the disruption is done. Think about how TikTok has
| disrupted Facebook or how Salesforce has disrupted Oracle. All of
| the big tech incumbents today also have lots of lots of older
| product infrastructure (Maps for Google, Dynamics for Microsoft,
| Mac Pros for Apple, etc) that they must maintain which is also
| difficult and risky to eliminate. But that infrastructure also
| imposes a drag on development for new features and capabilities.
| It is possible to build something simpler and smaller with higher
| profitability than Google Search (as one relevant example).
| rrdharan wrote:
| > higher profitability than Google Search
|
| Smaller and simpler I buy. Higher profitability I don't. Every
| serious analysis of this has suggested that ChatGPT is a loss
| leader, for example.
|
| I'd similarly be very skeptical of claims that Kagi has better
| margins that Google Search (and I doubt even the Kagi founder
| would make that claim with a straight face):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822830
| magic_hamster wrote:
| TikTok is just the current trend. Remember "vines"? I don't
| think TikTok offers something truly disruptive. They had the
| right timing and marketing for a specific audience. In a couple
| of years it will be something else.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| TikTok is disruptive and has replaced other disruptive
| technologies. And I'm sure, that not a few computer nerds are
| busy programming the next time and life sink.
|
| It's a competition for how much man is willing to flush his
| existence down the toilet.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Vines had to make money distributing video.
|
| TikTok (Douyin Dou Yin ) can just lose money and have it's
| losses covered by the Chinese Government, as long as it keeps
| broadcasting the right message abroad.
| maigret wrote:
| What is the message?
| [deleted]
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I personally know someone who used a Magic Eraser to
| whiten their teeth after watching a TikTok video. That is
| a terrible idea for so many reasons. Messages like those
| possibly benefit America's enemies by weakening the
| populace, whether through sketchy medical advice,
| promoting risky behavior like challenges, or suggesting
| illegal activities like hot-wiring cars.
| maigret wrote:
| That sounds very much like Facebook ads.
| sulam wrote:
| This is an interesting re-look because in '23 we are now starting
| to see what the next big wave could be, and it is obviously
| generative AI. If I took the diagram on the blog post and
| extended it, it would be something like the interaction model
| today being discrete and human-powered, but now we can envision a
| future where poking at things becomes an outdated model and
| computing comes to us. Voice assistants were a misnomer, they
| were voice UIs, but LLMs could potentially be the assistant we
| never got from Alexa, and transform how we use computers
| entirely.
| sfvisser wrote:
| AI models might transform how we use computers, but will it
| also change the outcome? Will it make society more productive,
| efficient and generate more growth? Or will it just provide
| more forms of entertainment, maybe provide some convenience. Or
| worse make the bureaucracies of life even more impenetrable?
|
| Don't know the answer, but as with software/internet in general
| we need to at least watch out for false sense of progress.
|
| I personally hope the next big wave will be somewhere along the
| IoT line and physical automation, agri-tech, health-tech, where
| software transcends the virtual and finally start automating
| the physical.
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