Henkjan de Krijger

@henq · 08 Jan 2020

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Briljant stuk over Bigtech revolutie

Deze mijnheer volg ik al jaren omdat hij helemaal onafhankelijk en heel diep nadenkt over big tech. Hij heeft mij al vele inzichten en inspiratie gebracht. Ook nu weer een briljant stuk. Hieronder het meest interessante stukje. Wat overigens dan net van een andere schrijver is maar hij geeft er dan weer een diepe analyse van.

Tech’s Story of Disruption

The story tech most loves to tell about itself is the story of disruption: sure, companies may appear dominant today, but it is only a matter of time until they are usurped by the next wave of startups. And indeed, that is exactly what happened half a century ago: IBM’s mainframe monopoly was suddenly challenged by minicomputers from companies like DEC, Data General, Wang Laboratories, Apollo Computer, and Prime Computers. And then, scarcely a decade later, minicomputers were disrupted by personal computers from companies like MITS, Apple, Commodore, and Tandy.

The most important personal computer, though, came from IBM, with an operating system from Microsoft. The former provided a massive distribution channel that immediately established the IBM PC as the most popular personal computer, particularly in the enterprise; the latter provided the APIs that created a durable two-sided network that made Microsoft the most powerful company in the industry for two decades.

That reality, though, was not permanent: first the Internet shifted the most important application environment from the operating system to the web, and then mobile shifted the most important interaction environment from the desk to the pocket. Suddenly it was Google and Apple that mattered most in the consumer space, while Microsoft refocused on the cloud and a new competitor, Amazon.

Dominance Epochs

Any discussion of dominance in tech touches on three epochs: IBM, Microsoft, and the present day. In this telling, companies like Google and Apple may be dominant now, but so were IBM and Microsoft, and, just as their days of IBM and Microsoft’s dominance passed, so too will today’s companies be eclipsed. Benedict Evans made this argument in a blog post:

The tech industry loves to talk about ‘moats’ around a business – some mechanic of the product or market that forms a fundamental structural barrier to competition, so that just having a better product isn‘t enough to break in. But there are several ways that a moat can stop working. Sometimes the King orders you to fill in the moat and knock down the walls. This is the deus ex machina of state intervention – of anti-trust investigations and trials. But sometimes the river changes course, or the harbour silts up, or someone opens a new pass over the mountains, or the trade routes move, and the castle is still there and still impregnable but slowly stops being important. This is what happened to IBM and Microsoft. The competition isn’t another mainframe company or another PC operating system — it’s something that solves the same underlying user needs in very different ways, or creates new ones that matter more. The web didn’t bridge Microsoft’s moat — it went around, and made it irrelevant. Of course, this isn’t limited to tech — railway and ocean liner companies didn’t make the jump into airlines either. But those companies had a run of a century — IBM and Microsoft each only got 20 years.

None of this is an argument against regulation per se of any specific issue in tech. If a company is abusing dominance today, it is not an argument against intervention to point out that it will lose that dominance in a decade or two — as Keynes says, ‘in the long term we’re all dead’. The same applies to regulation of issues that have little or nothing to do with market dominance, such as privacy (though people sometime fail to understand this distinction). Rather, the problem comes when people claim that somehow these companies are immortal — to say that is to reject all past evidence, and to claim that somehow there will never be another generational change in tech, which seems unwise.

#bigtech