posted by
martyb
on Friday November 09 2018, @03:31PM
from the startups-want-what-is-behind-door-number-3 dept.
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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The ‘Kill Zone’ for Industry Upstarts
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @03:39PM (1 child)
The author compares Picasa, which was bought by Google, to Instagram which was bought by Facebook. Somehow, from Instagram being more popular than Google Photos, he concludes that Google buying Picasa was a bad thing.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday November 09 2018, @03:42PM
Man, now I can't think about anything but how much less those two sites could've sucked.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 09 2018, @03:56PM (3 children)
So many existing industry players (pick the industry of your choice) give themselves advantage by helping to, or outright writing laws, regulations, industry standards, etc. that basically require other players to do things the way the established players do, meaning that a significant portion of their already sunk or planned capital investment would have to be duplicated by any potential startup competitors... then there are amazingly high membership dues, price of standards (would you believe $50K for the OBD-II interface spec in 1995? that's what it was...) etc.
In other words, this has been going on long before pets.com and instagram. The story of Philo Farnsworth is one of thousands of examples from the past.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 09 2018, @04:06PM (2 children)
A significant way anyone could help a Free Software or Open Source driver project is to purchase standards documents for its developers.
Me, I always used non-quite-final-draft specs which at one time were freely available for SCSI and Firewire, however they were eventually taken offline.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @05:27PM (1 child)
Psst... baidu.com (sometimes google translate helps, often it is not necessary).
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 09 2018, @06:44PM
I'll try not to blast your hint throughout every corner of the Internet.
One should not have to pay so much money for standards.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 09 2018, @04:04PM
They're still in business:
https://www.getstacker.com/security [getstacker.com]
I always felt they made a poor choice in their settlement, by permitting MS to continue offering hard drive encryption.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @04:17PM (3 children)
Most of these startsups specifically aim to get bought by the biggies. "Killzone" my ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09 2018, @04:37PM
Indeed, you can't buy a company if its owners don't want to sell it to you...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday November 09 2018, @05:12PM (1 child)
I would likely sell a company too, if offered stupid money. Seriously, anyone who thinks Markus Persson aka Notch, the maker of Minecraft did the wrong thing is insane. When Microsoft offers you $2.5 Billion dollars for your game / studio. You sell it. With money like that, he could make "Minecraft 2" and just not call it Minecraft. Though, maybe as part of the deal he had to agree not to do anything of the sort. $2.5 Billion dollars is more money than Doctor Evil wanted for not destroying the world. I mean, it's literally Villain money, but legitimately gained. Though, with the amount of cash he got, I might not care about making Game 2.0 or what not. There's a lot more good things you can do with that kind of money. Unfortunately from the sound of it, he didn't seem to know what to do with the money. In reality, he probably already had more money than he knew what to do with. This just gave him more issues, probably.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 09 2018, @05:32PM
US$2.5B is > 80 private islands (super-villain lairs).
Of course, instead of just having 80 ordinary super-villain lairs, you can really do 10 or 20 of them up right:
https://www.businessinsider.com/rent-david-copperfields-private-island-2015-9 [businessinsider.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Friday November 09 2018, @04:40PM (2 children)
Off course there is a solution. It's just that we can't break their backs any more (think the US military running on AWS) but we can help to build alternatives. Yes, government should directly support smaller businesses by introducing unfair tax, labor, and most importantly intellectual properties policies. Free use of any patents by individuals and companies under 10 million capitalization can be a start.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday November 09 2018, @05:35PM (1 child)
Free use of patents might be a hard sell. But dramatically shorter patent lifetimes might work.
It should be clear even to the non technical people at this point that almost everything is built on everything that comes before it. Longer patent life simply means slower pace of being able to build upon the past.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by legont on Friday November 09 2018, @05:53PM
Can a kid write a piece of software in his basement and become a billionaire without selling out? No, it is not possible; period.
Hence the innovation - the real one - is done and gone. The reason, obviously, is that he'd have to violate patents. If we want innovation, he has to be let free.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday November 09 2018, @05:37PM (1 child)
The Kill Zone describe is indeed real. But imagine back when Microsoft was the only one doing it. There was no Google. No Apple, to speak of.
It's easy to see why open source got a toe hold and was able to expand and grow. Then get corporate acceptance, like by IBM. Simply lack of competition created an entirely different kind of opportunity that flew under Microsoft's radar.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday November 09 2018, @06:11PM
The reason MS *could* do it was that IBM and Unix(AT&T) were operating with government handcuffs on. The better answer is to break up any company that captures more than, say, 15% of a market, and arrange the terms so that companies WANT to hit that magic number. 15% is a bit arbitrary, but 20% is too high for best results.
OTOH, for some projects you need the clout of a large company (or a government). So "strategic partnerships" need to be allowed (with extra government supervision).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday November 09 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)
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.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:38PM
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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.