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posted by martyb on Friday November 09 2018, @03:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the startups-want-what-is-behind-door-number-3 dept.

Bloomberg has an article about how big tech sets up a ‘Kill Zone’ for industry start ups. They do it three ways, either alone or in combination. One is by spotting and copying novel ideas and then beating the startups to market though massive investments. Another is to hire up the best engineers and developers, starving the industry for talent. A third is by just plain buying the startups out, either to run with the product or to set it on ice. Regardless, the net effect appears to be detriment of innovation (however that may be measured). There aren't any clear solutions to the situation yet.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday November 09 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday November 09 2018, @06:32PM (#759981)

    Guess who has control of a business? Their investors. In a startup, that equals the vultureventure capitalists (they'll sometimes change their name, but regardless of the words used they're playing the same game). The CEO may have control over the day-to-day, but ultimately their investors are calling the shots. So if you're a VC, and you know that approximately 99% of startups go south, and one of the big boys comes by dangling a nice large check that will turn your very likely 100% loss into a 60% profit, the odds of you saying "no thanks, I'd rather have you steal all this company's ideas and drive my investment into the ground" are approximately zero.

    Concerns about the pace of innovation don't seem all that relevant though, because most tech companies aren't actually all that innovative. The big boys got to be big boys by taking their product ideas from somebody else: Microsoft got big while inventing none of its key products - it didn't invent the operating system, the word processor, the spreadsheet, the idiot-database, or the video game console. Google was not even close to the first company to tackle web search. Facebook wasn't even close to the first social network. Amazon didn't invent online retailing. Apple can kinda sorta lay claim to being involved in inventing the PC, but not the GUI, not the smartphone/PDA, and not the digital music player. All those companies did was refine and market the heck out of what other people and companies (mostly now consigned to the dustbin of history) invented.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:38PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:38PM (#760409) Journal

    Amazon didn't invent online retailing.

    But they "invented" 1-click. Unbelievably, a patent was granted for 1-click.

    At the state of the web at the time, if Amazon hadn't done it, someone else would have within six months.

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.