Of course its true. What you’re saying is not only false, but it’s obviously false, on its face.
We know from observation that smaller companies are able to compete with Google, because Google spends billions of dollars on acquisitions of those smaller companies.
If Google had some insurmountable advantage in development, there would be no reason that they would be paying all this money to purchase all these other companies. Those companies are bought because they have developed something valuable, that Google didn’t.
Do you? Because what you’re saying doesn’t mesh with the reality of the industry.
You’re saying that it’s somehow not possible for someone else to code a better search algorithm than Google… I mean, that’s clearly nonsense on its face. How could you possibly think that no one else could do such a thing? Do you think that Google is somehow magic?
Algorithm development is not a mechanical process that you achieve through menial labor. Invention of new ideas is something which takes inspiration, and is accessible to anyone.
Google pays a ton of engineers to work on new ideas, so that when they come up with them, Google can benefit… but they by no means have a monopoly of innovative research. Tons of researchers outside of Google come up with all kinds of ideas better than the Google engineers, every day… and you see this manifested most clearly when Google acquires those other companies.
Who cares?
My success is not contingent upon some misguided notion that I must destroy Google or Amazon.
The argument that you are presenting about why no new technology companies can ever rise up, that it requires too much infrastructure, etc. is less true now than its ever been in the past.
As a small developer, I have access to infinitely more resources now than I’ve ever had. And tons of those resources are made available by the very companies you criticize. You’re saying things like, “You can never do this without huge server farms…” I have access to huge server farms. Nowadays, anyone can buy as much computing power as they want, without needing to make an immense up-front investment like we would have had to years ago. I’ve run my software on supercomputers that cost millions of dollars. I would never have had access to that kind of computing power in the past, and would never have been able to justify purchasing such hardware for the short term needs I had.
Not at all. The buyout aspect of this is just one of the reasons why your position is demonstrably wrong.
Yeah, and something new is going to come around the corner and enable whoever the next Google is.
You can try to break them up for those OTHER abuses, but the R&D spending itself is not an abuse. Again, to suggest otherwise is to suggest that a market leader is simply not allowed to compete any more.
Competition is not inherently anti-competitive. Anti-competition means that you’re doing something that prevents another company from competing… not simply competing against them.
If we were to use the analogy of racing, anti-competition means that I do something to hinder your ability to race. I damage your car or something. It doesn’t mean simply driving faster than you. Driving faster than you is what I’m supposed to be doing.
To be clear here, creating a better search ALGORITHM, which is what I said, does not require you to rent any computational power at all.
When Page and Brin developed PageRank, they were not billionaires backed by a mega-corporation. They were two researchers at Stanford. They simply had a better idea of how to solve the problem. And there is nothing about 1996 that made it uniquely enabling of such ideas.
Ok, the reality here is that there actually are competing search engines. Hell, there are folks here in this thread who say they’re just as good. So the idea that no one could possibly compete with them is clearly wrong.
But in terms of the numbers you are presenting here, again I gotta point out that these very companies are making such things infinitely more accessible than they’ve ever been before.
Sure, if you are actually talking about replicating Google’s entire search index, then yeah, you’re talking about needing to store 100PB of data, and renting that storage off of AWS would cost you a ton. It’s not free to actually execute what Google does.
But at the same time, it’s not impossible. This is how business has always been. You get investment for such things. The reality is that doing so today would be far easier than doing it in the past, where you would actually have to somehow purchase those petabytes of storage, all the underlying infrastructure, etc.
Enabling competition does not mean that anyone should be able to literally do anything that any business can do, for free. That’s clearly impossible to enable, unless you just destroy all businesses.
Just to get things back on track, if we want to say that Search, now that it’s one of the biggest industries in the world, is not trivially accessible to a new competitor… that’s fine. But that’s not because of anything Google is doing. It’s just because it’s one of the biggest businesses in the world now. I merely mentioned search because it’s what Google is known for, and they originally got into it with nothing more than a good idea. And the ability to create new ideas is not something which ended in the late 90’s.
