Senator Warren announced yesterday morning that she thinks we should break up the big tech monopolies. She focuses on Google, Facebook, and Amazon in particular, though there are obviously other companies that would also fit this description.
Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.
One focus is on how companies use mergers and acquisitions to limit competition, like how Facebook snaps up every available messaging company. This seems pretty self-explanatory. The other main focus of her Medium post, which I find more interesting, is that companies which own networks should not be allowed to participate in those networks. This one’s a little less clear to the layperson, so she lays on some history.
But where the value of the company came from its network, reformers recognized that ownership of a network and participating on the network caused a conflict of interest. Instead of nationalizing these industries — as other countries did — Americans in the Progressive Era decided to ensure that these networks would not abuse their power by charging higher prices, offering worse quality, reducing innovation, and favoring some over others. We required a structural separation between the network and other businesses, and also demanded that the network offer fair and non-discriminatory service.
Her plan:
My administration would restore competition to the tech sector by passing legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.
[…] Amazon Marketplace, Google’s ad exchange, and Google Search would be platform utilities under this law. Therefore, Amazon Marketplace and Basics, and Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well.
This is an interesting idea! And it’s high time we had this conversation at a presidential-campaign level. (I’m sure this was eaten by various shitstorms in yesterday’s news, but still.)
She sort of talks about how we also need to deal with privacy, but it’s not included in this plan, which is fair. The post says the same about preventing foreign tampering. To me, the big thing that’s actually missing is how to handle the infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Those two service umbrellas undergird a great deal of the world’s technological infrastructure, including that of the American government. In the case of Amazon, they also provide most of the actual corporate profit, I believe. The cheapish, on-demand infrastructure they provide is actually pretty helpful to small innovators too.
Anyway, this, the co-determination bill, the CFPB, are all good examples of what I love about Warren. Her “making capitalism work for everybody” shtick just really resonates with this neoliberal shill.
I was originally going to post this yesterday afternoon, but my flight had terrible wifi, so now you’re getting it after dinner from Tokyo.
jeffreyw
Thread needs a grackle.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@jeffreyw: What a pretty day it is in that picture.
Baud
Oh, your on it! Awesome.
Any thoughts on why she doesn’t mention Apple or Microsoft?
laura
@jeffreyw: Come for the grackle, stay for the cardinal.
HeartlandLiberal
All Warren is doing is urging a return to the anti-trust laws that were effective in preventing monopolies. Those have fallen apart ever since Microsoft stalked the halls of Congress purchasing Congressmen and Senators a couple decades ago, and since then, all thought of enforcing the concept of anti-trust has pretty much vanished from the American political and legislative landscape.
Quoting from the Wikipedia article on the settlement with DOJ and Microsoft in 1998:
The dissenting (opinion) states regarded the settlement as merely a slap on the wrist. Industry pundit Robert X. Cringely believed a breakup was not possible, and that “now the only way Microsoft can die is by suicide.”[31] Andrew Chin, an antitrust law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who assisted Judge Jackson in drafting the findings of fact, wrote that the settlement gave Microsoft “a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other ‘platform software’ under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: I’m having a hard time seeing how you’d take action against Apple. We stopped enforcing “you can’t bundle a browser with an operating system”-style things some time ago. They’re sort of just vertically integrated.
Microsoft, I’m not familiar enough with their business.
Betty Cracker
Agree that it’s past time to have this conversation — and the cult of the shareholder discussion Warren raised with her Accountable Capitalism Act. Of all the candidates so far, Warren has the most bold, original ideas, IMO. She’d be an excellent president.
Baud
I’m all for he conversation, but I feel like this specific plan is out of left field. There isn’t enough detail to understand how it would work, and it’s not like it builds on existing proposals as far as I know.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Huh? That’s what this plan would change, I thought. Separate platforms from things that run on it.
NotMax
Some good ideas in it, some half-baked ones. And doesn’t account for (or seemingly even acknowledge) synergy.
Don’t understand disallowing Amazon Basics from being available on Amazon. Like, just as an example, telling Disney they can provide programming to any mass media outlet except one they own.
trnc
My totally off the cuff opinion based on zero research – anti-trust may be a tougher sell during times of low employment because a lot of people will think, “Who cares whether my job comes from a little company or a corporate giant?” despite the fact that there’s plenty of history of companies jacking up prices after minimizing competition. I hope she comes up with arguments that land better. I’m not sure that innovation is stifled so much as most of it benefiting a small number of big corporations.
On the other hand, govt research that gave us GPS, the internet, etc is certainly being stifled by diverting tax revenues to those corporations, as well as by making it conventional wisdom that government has to be 100% efficient or it’s wasting our money. IE, innovation is inherently messy and involves learning from mistakes.
Pogonip
@HeartlandLiberal: Plus ca change…
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: if you look at the specific examples it clearly has nothing to do with the old operating system debate. Apple doesn’t operate and participate in any ‘platform utilities’ I can think of although I guess you could make a case for the App Store. IANAL of course.
Major Major Major Major
@trnc: innovation is less stifled because we got lucky and the people who own all the shit also enjoy making new shit. Google doesn’t have to produce and release the cutting-edge AI research that makes products we enjoy every day possible.
snoey
@NotMax:
Not sure that this matches Warren’s proposal, but try thinking of Google search, Amazon order and delivery, etc. as common carriers. Any 50 pound box to Toledo gets the same price and service no matter the shipper. Similarly any vendors merchandise should get equal treatment on Amazon, and the way to do that is to split the vendor part of Amazon for the ordering platform.
Brachiator
I don’t agree with Warren. I think that she is applying 19th century thinking to 21st century issues. I’m not even sure what she is trying to accomplish. Her ideas are also similar to Bernie Sanders in his goofy insistence on breaking up banks.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Part of my problem is that I really don’t know what constitutes a platform. The examples seemed arbitrarily selected. I don’t know why the iPhone isn’t a platform for apps or iTunes.
jeffreyw
@Dorothy A. Winsor: (checks file info) That was taken on Saturday, February 9, 2019 10:50 AM. Just hours shy of being exactly one month ago. We’ve had snow and some ice since then but it’s been dry long enough lately that the ground doesn’t squelch underfoot.
Baud
@Brachiator:
I think it’s the opposite problem. Bernie is all slogan. This seems like too much detail that doesn’t have enough explanation behind it.
Eolirin
Yeah I find it very hard to take anyone seriously on this topic if Microsoft isn’t automatically top of mind here. Their cloud business as a whole is *bigger* than Amazon’s, and their reliance on the use of Azure to provide their own services would make this kind of break up pretty much fatal to the company.
Though I honestly think that the whole platform owners can’t create product for their platforms thing doesn’t really work in tech. The platforms get substantially better when they companies making them are also building things with them. It’d have weird and fatal effects on the gaming console market if applied there as well and would make it impossible for app stores to function if applied as well. Office couldn’t be sold through the Windows Store. Apple couldn’t put any of its inbox apps, or at least those that take money, in the App Store etc. Apple Music and iTunes would need to be spun off. This could potentially make the economics of YouTube impossible to sustain depending on how you look at the interaction of Google Ads and YouTube as separate platforms.
Not that it has any chance in hell of becoming law mind.
And I do think there needs to be a lot more regulation in this space. But I’m leery of things that will make the overall tech landscape worse for all participants, and some of those proposals have a high chance of doing that.
Chris Johnson
@Brachiator: Good point, we should also break up banks and split off deposit banks from wildly speculative gambling institiutions :)
I like seeing Warren work on this stuff. She’s got my vote. She makes Bernie look like an feckless clown. With luck that’ll help.
If people actually love capitalism, this is the way to go. Otherwise you’ll absolutely get revolution, destruction, and enormous backslides into more primitive conditions. You simply cannot fight late stage capitalism with destruction: only reform will do any good.
John S.
There’s somewhat of a precedent for this concept of separating the platform from the participant in terms of foreign exchange transactions called the Global FX Code.
Part of that framework is to separate the financial platforms for foreign exchange from the participants who execute foreign exchange transactions to ensure there is no manipulation of exchange rates, and to promote an open and healthy FX market.
Many central banks (including our own Federal Reserve) have signed on to this framework. If it’s good enough for the financial industry, why not technology?
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: as I wrote to you above, one could make a case for the App Store. But the iPhone isn’t the world’s monolithic pocket computing interface in the same way google is for search/search ads, or Facebook is for social/social ads. Also you don’t technically have to use the App Store.
iTunes is free and you’ve always been allowed to distribute software with your devices.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
But her proposal isn’t limited to monopoly platforms. It applies to all companies with over $25 billion in revenue (or something like that). And you don’t technically have to use Google search.
debbie
Speaking as an uninformed fine arts major from long ago, I’d prefer attention be given to where anti-trust efforts really matter: oil, gas, etc. They’re a far greater threat to the world.
Major Major Major Major
@Eolirin:
Similarly, I find it hard to evaluate without seeing the proposal for the PaaS stuff. It’s too bad she’s well-known for only writing one short Medium post about an economic policy and then immediately letting it drop :)
Eolirin
@John S.: Because without using the systems that you’re building you tend to build worse systems. A really solid example of this is gaming consoles. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony make hardware and tailor OS software based on their needs as game developers. This leads to better hardware and better developer support because they understand the needs of their platform. If you make it so that platform holders can’t contribute product, you remove that institutional knowledge, and the platform is worse off for everyone.
Engineering isn’t the same as financial services.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: you do if you want your ads to show up on google search.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Something’s broken in the market when Apple is (essentially) the only smart phone maker making money.
How one fixes it, I dunno.
But it’s dangerous to competition and the long-term health of the market when huge companies make so much money, act as gate-keepers, and have their lobbyists active in setting local land use, state taxing, and federal trade and business policy.
I’ve felt for a long time that cable companies should not be allowed to control and sell content on their pipes. (Utility companies should provide infrastructure in return for their exclusivity and (essentially) guaranteed profit and guaranteed survival as a business.) Some parts of the smart phone/app business are like utilities, and some aren’t. Figuring out how to cut the Gordian Knot is difficult.
I’m glad Warren is thinking about it, and I’m glad there’s at least some discussion of the problem. I don’t think there’s enough outrage yet to cause Congress to act…
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Right. But how many app developes feel like they don’t need the App store.
ETA:. I don’t want to nitpick. The issue is that I can’t get my head around either the policy or the implementation here.
debbie
@Another Scott:
Make better phones. Apple monopolizes because their products are superior, not because they swing their considerable weight around like Microsoft.
StringOnAStick
@jeffreyw: I love your bird photos. I suspect your feeder is on every local bird’s “must visit” list.
Baud
@debbie:
Apple swings its weight around plenty. They mostly do it through patents and poaching people. But they aren’t the only ones in that business.
John S.
@Eolirin:
Perhaps you aren’t aware, but the largest driving force behind the financial industry is technology and engineering. FinTech is a massive sector of the economy; and I should know because I work in it.
Do you really think the advent of computerized trading didn’t have a major impact on the stock market? Do you think there is no risk in the company who built an electronic trading trading platform to use it for their benefit to not only make it better, but also make it easier for them to profit from market manipulation?
We’re not just talking about video games here.
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: I mean, there was that major issue with bullshit patents.
@Baud: Eolirin has made some good points here about software production, but I feel like there must exist a sensible rule to separate “things like vertically-integrated device-and-native-software companies” from “things like the twitter ad exchange.” That said, it is not delineated in this one single blog post she released on the topic yesterday.
ETA less dickishly: (I am very jet lagged and cranky) your gut feeling that these seem different is correct! And she should and I assume will address it
Betty Cracker
Fellow jackal Martin had some fascinating thoughts on Warren’s proposal yesterday — well worth a read. Link and link.
Another Scott
@debbie: It’s not that simple.
Remember back to the iPod days. Apple was able to buy up (essentially) all the world-wide flash memory production for the release of one of their music players. Nobody else could compete with them if they wanted to because Apple had all the parts needed.
Apple is huge now. They have the phone production economies of scale. They often have the best parts. They have control over the distribution network, and get a big slice of any potential profits.
Google’s smartphone cameras and picture processing are better than Apple’s. LG has better sound and cheap storage expansion. Samsung has better screens. Etc. But none of them are able to make money on their phones except Apple. And Apple makes huge profits.
It’s not just “make better stuff”.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Baud:
Patents and poaching are universal.
I’d like Adobe to be in Warren’s sights. The way they’ve forced users to “rent” their very expensive software is appalling.
Eolirin
@debbie: That’s categorically not true. Apple has a few major advantages that lead to their profitability, and quality isn’t one of them. Their devices are not any better and in some important aspects tend to be worse than similarly priced devices from competitors. They are underpowered at any given price point, they sell a tiny fraction of phones, but they make substantially higher margin on each than anyone else.
They do this by focusing on high end devices targeted at affluent and social status focused markets coupled with an insane degree of supply chain mastery and strong vertical integration and a carefully enforced branding strategy.
Doing this has involved coercion and abuse of their market power, though, moreso, I think under Jobs. They have a history of blacklisting publications that criticize them, and the recent legal spat with Qualcomm highlights how they’ve been able to exert pressure on suppliers to lower their costs.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Like I said, that’s my problem. She proposes a specific plan, gives some examples of some things that would be broken up but doesn’t mention others, but doesn’t adequately explain the rationale undergirding it. Maybe things will become clearer in time, but I’m not keen about this roll out.
Betty Cracker
@debbie: OMFG, don’t get me started on Adobe! I’ll never stop complaining, LOL!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Now that’s a plan that can bring this country together. Nationalize Adobe!
debbie
@Eolirin:
But why single out Apple, or even tech? That seems pretty much the way business is done.
Betty Cracker
@Eolirin: Would you agree that Apple has better security?
Eolirin
@John S.: Of course it did, but as you yourself point out the platform for financial services is very different, for obvious reasons, from game consoles or general IaaS and PaaS cloud services. This proposal does not *seem* to draw a distinction.
That’s a huge problem.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: so far it’s one of the least-vague proposals for any policy by any candidate! Other than housing assistance, for some reason.
ETA low bar yes, just saying, it’s March 2019
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
I remember back to when Adobe began their campaign to get their software into every single business. “You too can be a graphic designer!” Um, no. And now that they’ve made themselves indispensable, they gouge and they crawl through users’ computers. Adobe is like the Mafia!
Eolirin
@Betty Cracker: No. Apple has some of the worst security in the tech world. Android is worse, depending on your phone manufacturer, because it lacks a centralized authority for security fixes and updates.
jeffreyw
@StringOnAStick:
You would be correct.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator:
I don’t get the Amazon hate. It is simply the most convenient retailer I’ve ever contemplated, with a fantastic return policy and seamless ordering on a secure platform. They’re not Micro$ofting other retailers by buying up competitors and jacking up prices. They’re also not operating as rentiers like Google is.
For all the gripes about wages and conditions, they pay according to local scale for warehouse work, and they do need to be held to legal standards on breaks and overtime – but that’s why we have laws. There’s no reason at all to break up something that a guy who came from nothing built up.
Just Chuck
@Major Major Major Major:
That nonsense bugged me from the start. Why should Netscape have been granted such a privileged position that their particular type of software was to be forever given a paying market for it, separate and elevated apart from all other software? Microsoft had committed plenty of other abuses then, like strong-arming OEMs against shipping models with other OS’s on them (or yes, other browsers), and that should have been the focus of the hearings, not protecting Netscape’s failed business model. Only after the browser became free did it actually become any good.
biff murphy
Domo arigato!
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
There’s an actual proposal, but I don’t feel like there’s a coherent policy yet. Some of the other things she’s proposed, I understand the policy underlying it. Not here.
But it’s an interesting discussion. I’ll give her credit for that.
Momentary
@Betty Cracker: I spent ten formative years working for One Of Those Companies and I agree with Martin’s comments 1000% (and would like to subscribe to his newsletter).
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Betty Cracker:
I want Adobe to die. It is bloatware, and the utility of their shitty products is far outweighed by the amount of space and memory devoured. Plus, I resent the shit out of the rentiering of the annual licensing.
Baud
I gotta run. Thanks for posting this. It’s nice to be able to talk about something substantive instead of our national nightmare.
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: @Momentary: they are good comments! Thanks for linking BC.
I still think App Store type things are not the intended target here but yes, needs much clarification.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Actually Amazon is way worse than MS ever was. They will take the sales data of third party sellers to figure out what products to get into, then use their market position to undercut those third parties or to contract with their suppliers and starve them out. They’re probably the most predatory of the tech companies. And definitely have the worst labor practices.
But it does tend to lower prices for the consumer.
Major Major Major Major
Well, I expect software engineers the world over will celebrate this proposal, since it will finally let them split everything up into autonomous microservices.
I’ll show myself out. Night all!
MattF
I got stuck on the M&A question. The tech giants are so big and have so much cash that they don’t need to ‘merge’ with anyone– they simply go out and buy what they need. And you can’t say they limit competition because they really don’t have any, except maybe for one other. I suppose there’s a word to describe a market of this sort– but it’s not really susceptible to classical anti-trust theories.
Steve in the ATL
@debbie: damn—I’ll bet it was Adobe who left the headless rabbit in my yard yesterday!
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: some companies are pretty blatant about buying fledgling competitors to kill/absorb them; or because they want to develop something in that space in the future with a cleared field.
horatius
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: If a quarter million dollar loan from parents is nothing, then Bezos really came from nothing.
debbie
@Steve in the ATL:
Then you know they’ll be back…
Eolirin
@debbie: I was responding to you saying build a better phone. People do that and it doesn’t help. Apple has advantages that have nothing to do with quality, and it uses its market power to maintain them. If you view Apple being just about the only company able to make a profit on smartphones as a problem, you’re not going to find a solution in competition under existing market dynamics.
And yeah this applies to all sorts of other things too. I’m using the Apple situation because you brought it up, but my bigger point is that better products isn’t a solution to these issues in general.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Eolirin:
Oh no! Offering similar goods at a lower price? How awful.
/s
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@horatius:
Bezos’ situation was very similar to Bill Clinton’s, except that his mother did a far better job of picking a stepfather for him.
I still vote “came from nothing”.
debbie
@Eolirin:
Understood.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Eolirin:
I turn on my Apple and it works without a lot of fuss. I don’t have to configure a bunch of shit, and know that there’s some level of curation on the apps, as opposed to android. True, I don’t have all of the customization options that there are with android, but then again, I’m not some dork ass incel 25 year old who gets into self expression by nerding out on what I can make my phone do.
Eolirin
@Major Major Major Major: I think there are potential issues, especially in new or really specialized subfields, around being able to suck up most of the talent pool too.
germy
@debbie:
I remember a few years back when I applied for an copy editor job.
“Must be proficient in Adobe InDesign” they said.
I deleted my application. I’d spent a few years at a different job, “enjoying” InDesign. Our bosses made it replace a different program we’d be using successfully for a decade. When they forced InDesign on us, production slowed.
InDesign seems to have been created by people who enjoyed creating secret puzzles when they were kids. Because to make it do anything, the user had to go through multiple hidden tasks to get to the desired task. And the end result was no better.
Betty Cracker
@Eolirin: You say no, but then you admit Android is worse. Of the two, I think Apple is still better on mobile privacy and security. That’s one of the reasons I stick with them.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Android is awful for a whole host of reasons, but a high end Samsung or a Google Pixel is not appreciably harder, at this point, to use or set up than iOS.
Betty Cracker
@germy: I worked at an agency that used InDesign for years. Sweet Jeebus, I hate Adobe!
germy
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: What I don’t understand about Apple (and I’ve used Macs exclusively at home since the mid-90s) is this:
They boast about their excellent security; their firewall. But the last macbook pro we bought (2013) I was on the phone with customer service and they said “Oh, that firewall? You can turn that off, you don’t need it.”
germy
@Betty Cracker: It’s just so clumsy and slow and cumbersome. It was a big deal just to get it to display my work in normal rez.
Eolirin
@Betty Cracker: Sorry you said Apple, so I took that to mean MacOS and the broader computing world as well. iOS is more secure than Android, sure. The gap is smaller if you’re on a Galaxy S or Pixel device but Google does a much worse job with app store curation.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: They are only able to do this because they have access to data that they would not have if they weren’t the platform holder. No one else on the platform can effectively compete with them, and their platform is so big that it’s very hard to avoid participating in it. You don’t see this as a problem?
BellyCat
@Eolirin:
This.
The challenge is to encourage design innovation from both internal and external parties without limiting potential from either, without favoring the originator. It *can* be done, but it’s nigh impossible unless the code is released to all developers.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Maybe it’s a process, like talking to kids about sex?
You tell them what they are ready for, what they are able to comprehend, and then when they are ready for more, you give them more. Kind of like starting with a grid where they can start to place the bare bones of their understanding, and then you start filling in the blanks as time goes on.
I also think that if you provide a ton of details right out of the gate, then there’s a good chance that the media (or the haters) will latch on to one of those details and then the discussion can be derailed by some detail and it never goes anywhere.
That’s why I don’t mind the Green New Deal, except for the fact that they need to make it clear that this is the broad outlines of the approach, and there’s more info to come.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@germy:
My purely speculative guess is that malware can’t drill down low enough to get anything meaningful, so that the asshole hackers/phishes/scammers (that need to be publicly slaughtered, as an example) don’t waste their efforts on Apple.
Another Scott
@Eolirin: Devil’s advocate:
Lots of stuff I see offered on Amazon is also offered on eBay and Newegg for essentially the same price. Presumably eBay and Newegg get similar information as Amazon.
Where do you draw the line that a company is too big or is grabbing too much information or their platform is too utility-like?
I dunno.
I’ve had Prime on Amazon for a very long time. Some of Amazon’s practices make me nervous, but Bezos has seemed much more interested in growing his companies at the expense of immediate profits than just about any tech titan I can think of. Investors seem to think that eventually Amazon is going to be big enough that he’ll start raking in those sweet, sweet monopoly rents any day now, but that doesn’t seem to be part of his DNA.
I keep seeing more Rakuten ads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Alibaba eventually tries to break into the US market in a much bigger way. As big as Amazon is, they’re still a small part of US retail (roughly 4%, vs ~ 7-8% for Walmart). We need to keep an eye on them, but so far I’m not worried, and they don’t have an easy path to get much, much bigger.
We’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bobby Thomson
If you separate Google Ads from Google, isn’t the only way left of making money to sell data? Making it impossible to get rid of that?
BellyCat
@debbie:
Agreed. And they are not the only ones. This is a new model that many companies which dominate various design and engineering industries have adopted and are moving toward. (Looking especially at you Autodesk and Solidworks).
The proposal that I would like to see is something that is similar to the automotive industry, where parts are required to be available for at least seven years for any car sold. Even after production is stopped.
How this would translate into software is that when one purchases ANY software program, every new release of that software should be free and compatible with all new operating systems for at least the next SEVEN years, once the program is purchased.
The forced upgrades (often annual!) for businesses, especially small business, are incredibly cost prohibitive.
(I was at a leading digital design conference several years ago when the chairman of Autodesk spoke about how they are “incredibly committed to cross platform sharing”. The entire audience erupted with laughter, boos and hisses.)
solitare
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
There is plenty of malware on apple and it works amazingly well. apple isn’t that secure. But you bomb the road most traveled, and apple’s market share is to low and there isn’t enough critical data on it that you want. I am cleaning malware of macs at work all the time.
germy
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
That was my reasoning for the over twenty years we only bought Macs for home use. But the past decade or so I’ve been reading about hackers targeting Macs.
I’ve always been reluctant to purchase microsoft computers for our home because from the beginning I read the malware horror stories.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Eolirin:
No, I don’t. The third party sellers are free to run their own portal and keep their sales volume secret (which is a little weird, as most companies want to be known to customers as high volume purveyors of particular products). Instead, they have chosen to engage Amazon as a broker and can only privatize their info if they choose to negotiate it.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: The primary reason why MacOS isn’t targeted as much, though it’s targeted enough that turning off security features is a really dumb idea, is because it has about 8% global market share.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
The problem is that she didn’t propose a policy outline like the GND. She proposed specific actions and named specific products. On one level, that’s certainly a good thing. But it also raises the question of what the underlying policy rationale is.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Bobby Thomson:
When I look at google, I see something that is akin to a utility, and should have its conduct and payment rates regulated in a way akin to a utility.
CliosFanBoy
@trnc: I’d argue the reverse, that people would be less willing to attack trusts when jobs were scare. “We need every job we can get, why risk ruining that successful company and lose its jobs??”
however….
Historically, the anti-trust movement of the 1890s-1910s seemed to grow dependent upon factors other than how well or poorly the economy was doing at that moment.
JPL
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Ditto.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Baud: Agreed. I like the idea, but not her remedies. I’m not certain consumers want or can afford the separation of vertically integrated entities. Like grocery stores, where the price of milk is subsidized to get you into the store. As well, her plan has other implications — how is this idea separate from cable TV, and do people understand that separating networks/cable companies/streaming services will result in higher prices? The Smithsonian Channel exists and is cheap because it is owned by Showtime, which is owned by CBS.
germy
@BellyCat:
Every place I’ve ever worked, every few months a middle manager would stand up and say “Okay, listen up people! We’re updating our system!”
And then we’d have to throw away all the old ways of doing stuff and train on new/upgraded/updated operating systems. And there’d be a week or so where everything would slow down because the new system was buggy or incompatible with the computers we were using, or we couldn’t load old documents, etc.
And then when vacation time came, my wife and I would take the kids to someplace where people demonstrated how they’d been making cheese or bread or something using the same tools and techniques their great-great grandparents had been using. Our last trip to Italy, we saw glass blowers in a five hundred year old building.
I think the disruptors are damaging to the soul. I’m not a luddite, if a better or more efficient way can be found to do something then great. But so much of what I see at work is change just for the sake of disruption and profits for places like adobe.
CliosFanBoy
when it comes to cable I wish I could pick the channels I want, like from a buffet.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: No they aren’t, that’s the problem! You cannot establish a viable portal without a massive amount of capital investment. Amazon has a distortive market presence due to their size and they absolutely abuse that fact to their own advantage at the cost of other businesses. Market forces can’t mitigate those effects because the cost of not doing business on Amazon is as fatal to many of those companies as Amazon eventually undercutting them or stealing their suppliers is.
@Another Scott: Newegg and Ebay don’t have the equivalent of Amazon Basics though. That’s kinda the sticking point there. I don’t think Newegg is an open platform for third party vendors and eBay doesn’t sell its own stuff. They don’t compete with their own users for customers, so the data doesn’t mean the same thing. And they’re engaged in far fewer markets generally too.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for linking to Martin’s comments. I’ve experienced what he described re apps when at the Smithsonian — we had apps (still available although may not work with current iOS and Android). The apps stores were critical as while we had outside contractors build the apps, and then the apps needed to be vetted to run on each platform AND we needed the platforms to tell us when we had to update our apps to match changes in the operating systems. Without that support, we would have had a short-lived and probably buggy product. And having to match even more operating systems would have made the apps unaffordable as each was a separate piece of software.
solitare
I don’t think many people here get exactly what Warren was thrusting at. There’s a reason Microsoft and apple weren’t explicitly called out. I also work IT in a big four consulting firm and all the tech companies are our clients and we use all their products.
In apples case they don’t make the best or the worst of anything. They make solid mid range products across a spectrum and vertically integrate the entire mess. In Microsoft’s case their business of Azure + Active Directory + Server + Exchange + MDM, + Office + Sharepoint + Windows is the backbone that business depends on. And you are free to spin up Linux servers on Azure, integrated physical ones, use iOS or android for mobile and tablets, and through in some JAMF servers (needed for mac) and macs as you will. You can install office on a mac and you can install itunes and run an iPhone off a PC. Neither of these companies are really problematic, they just offer a complete eco system. If you want to nitpick apples strangle of supply chains to kill competitors and use of slave labor and conflict minerals is bad but they aren’t alone here, just one of the worst offenders.
Amazon is a whole different animal, and it’s not AWS that’s the issue really. When you sell something on Amazon they run analytics on what sells and what people buy. So if your product does well there will quickly be an Amazon basics version of it, or one of Amazon’s other in house brands. Then they will put that product as the first result in any search, sell it at a loss, corner the market and drive you out of business. This kills off all sorts of small businesses that sell electronic nick nacks, make cables, sell peripherals, hell they do this to tea, food products, vitamins, health products, everything under the sun. And for the most part if you are a small brand you have to sell on Amazon. That’s the problem, not Alexa and Kindle.
Google and facebook are problems because of all the data harvesting going on (something which Microsoft and apple do but not to the same scale and they are much more cautious about privacy) combined with their control of advertising space. They control what people buy and what people see. And each service they snap up only increases that control.
The problem with the whole situation is that tech just works better at scale and with integration. Microsofts stack of business products are good because they are so integrated. People like apples products because they control the production, hardware, and software for them. Both of these are good things. Even on a smaller scale if you were designing a home network if you get a netgear switch, router, modem, NAS, and wifi aps rather than mixing and matching brands is going to work better than slapping various brands together. That’s one of the reasons CISCO dominates the high end corporate networking arena.
Warren seems to get this which is why she isn’t talking about blowing up AWS, Microsoft, apple, and the shit load of other tech companies you haven’t heard about but are also integrated monopolies in everything from graphics, to storage, to networking, to firewalls, to security, to DRAM. What she’s talking about is strictly using your market share to data mine on your customers and competitors that are forced into your market and then shutting down any and all competition through unfair practices.
Ohio Mom
I just took Warren’s proposal as, “Here’s something I think is a big problem and my first spitball of a guess of what to do about it.” I’m not too hung up on the details, those will come as her proposal is further discussed by the public, and then hopefully debated in Congress. We do need a renewed focus on trust busting, and as others have noted, not just in the tech sector.
The bigger issue to me is, Warren needs to start talking about international affairs. Her focus on the economy and domestic issues is going to start branding her as a girl who shies away from addressing the big important male issues of defense and America’s role on the world stage.
I would have liked her to derisively snort at Trump’s proposal to shake down our allies who host our military bases, and explain why it’s an incredibly dumb idea and what it would cost us in prestige, influence and cash. Show that she will take the lead in defending us.
I never imagined I would be jonesing for a Democratic candidate to show their hawk side but Trump is showing me there are a lot of things I haven’t imagined.
Miss Bianca
@Baud:But that doesn’t mean the need isn’t there. Amazon is evil – they serve as a platform for e-commerce, see what’s a hot seller, then start selling those products themselves. Plus they are shitty to merchants in other ways. But because they are such an overwhelming force in e-commerce, you’re damned if you work with them and damned if you don’t. This may look like it’s coming out of left field, but if Warren has been listening to her constituents, I bet a *lot* of them have given her an earful about how huge Internet forces like FB, Google and Amazon make it just as hard to do business as they make it easy.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Eolirin:
Amazon is the 21st century version of the Sears catalog of the late 1800s and early 1900s; the only differences are a broader inventory, instant ordering and faster delivery.
Sears had arrangements with its third party vendors as well.
Procopius
A Judge Ordered Microsoft to Split. Here’s Why It’s Still a Single Company
Amir Khalid
@BellyCat:
It’s actually not a new model. IBM in its salad days — the 1950s to the 1970s — would rent mainframe hardware to customers rather than sell it.
Eolirin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: That comparison is flawed for a number of reasons, but the biggest is that the Sears catalog didn’t have market power roughly equivalent to the entirety of the rest of the retail market.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@BellyCat:
Can we talk about what a chunk of shit Office 365 is as compared to what the vastly superior resident Office suites were? Whatever version I had going in 2010 was quick, predictable and had a reliable search function. This thing? Bloated and less functional, but I think it has social media plugins built in, which are allegedly good.
Eolirin
@Miss Bianca: Thiiis 100%
And maybe that’s also why MS hasn’t come up despite being massive and being involved in many of the same areas. I think their business model doesn’t generate as many conflicts of interest with their customers, though there are still plenty of potential issues, and they’re mostly working with much larger companies where this isn’t as likely to bubble up from individual constituents.
Immanentize
@Ohio Mom:
So, you are not a fan of
“It’s the economy, stupid?”
Everyone who is in finance is predicting a slow down if not a recession over the next year. We just went from 300,000 new jobs per month to 20,000. People running businesses see the need is being met at current employment rates. Gas prices are rising. Inflation is up. Comcast really sucks. People happily use and happily hate Apple and Amazon. I think Warren is imagining what voters will be thinking about on Super Tuesday 2020.
Brickley Paiste
Warren will make an excellent AG in Harris’ administration.
rikyrah
This story has mushroomed
Daniel Schulman (@DanielSchulman) Tweeted:
NEW: Cindy Yang, the founder of the Florida spa where Bob Kraft was busted for soliciting prostitution, wasn’t just posing for selfies with members of Trumpworld. She’s been selling Chinese business executives access to Trump and his family at Mar-a-Lago
https://t.co/zUCFhK1B8h https://t.co/Vf2ZYmIzHH https://twitter.com/DanielSchulman/status/1104345917182918657?s=17
debbie
@germy:
Exactly! I spent years and years using QuarkXPress on a Mac, loving it, and when asked to create a newsletter for where I work now and only having access to InDesign on a PC, I was miserable. Three levels of menus for what used to be a single keystroke! As nice as it was to be working on design again, I was kind of happy when they decided not to continue publishing.
Adobe: Bigger, not Better.
Rand Careaga
I made my living on Adobe software beginning with the first iteration of Illustrator in 1987 through my retirement (“Creative Suite 5”) eighteen months ago. I detested the bundling of the applications into “suites,” the withdrawal of printed documentation and particularly, of course, the move to the subscription model. This is what happens when a company founded by engineers falls into the hands of marketers.
This being said, I don’t have issues with the 3.5 applications I use(d) most: Illustrator*, Photoshop, InDesign** and Dreamweaver, being more than decently proficient in the first three and capable, given a running start, of cobbling together a website on the latter. My present hardware (a retirement gift to myself) is stuffed with RAM, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, my “Fetid Fog” software runs without ever having phoned home.
*It was certainly helpful coming in, so to say, at the beginning of the movie. Bezier curves were a revelation, but the learning curve seemed steep at the time, and it was a much simpler program 32 years ago. I can’t imagine what it would be like coming to it cold today.
**Also came early to InDesign from PageMaker (ducks), and found even v. 1 a vast improvement, not that this was a difficult bar to clear. A couple of commentators above have their issues with it, but InDesign always delivered for me without undue grief, including a couple of long and complex publications. I don’t miss BrainDead Systems, my old employer, but I occasionally regret that without the former daily exercise my skillset begins to display spots of rust.
Villago Delenda Est
Corporations are creatures of government, by their very nature. The regulations should floooooooow.
Also, too, nationalize the ISPs and Telcos (pretty much the same thing) and cut their executives off from all their bonuses.
StringOnAStick
@jeffreyw: Heh, heh; excellent sly joke there Mr FeederGuy!
A friend took me to see a Great Horned Owl nest a few weeks ago; it looks like the female is sitting on eggs now and its the right time for this location. Too bad I’m going to be laid up for a few weeks soon and I’ll probably miss seeing them in the nest in person.
debbie
@Rand Careaga:
PageMarker is as low a standard as Donald Trump. Things couldn’t get worse!
Immanentize
@Amir Khalid:
Many people here are old enough to remember when you did not own the telephone in your own house. You rented it from AT&T ultimately paying them multiple times it’s worth in monthly rental charges.
Then there was the movie industry vertical integration monopolies. And the payola Monopoly scandals in the music industry. Each was a new “technological” challenge to anti-trust laws and needed sorting in new ways. We have treated big tech companies like public utilities granting them monopoly powers. Yes, removing those powers through anti-trust actions will be messy and will harm some efficiencies. But the theory is that it will allow for more creativity, competition, and security and personal privacy down the road.
Trade offs, but Warren is suggesting the harm that will be felt today will lead to benefits tomorrow, which is always the Trust Buster’s theme.
Eolirin
@Rand Careaga: I think the core problem with the Adobe stuff, at least from a UX perspective, is that it’s designed to meet the needs of extremely complex workflows, and that there’s no industry recognized suite of products that’s geared toward more moderate and simple tasks. So it’s got a level of complexity that’s excessive for most of the people forced to use it, but necessary for people doing specific types of work.
debbie
@Eolirin:
I know I’m out of my element when speaking with developers, etc., but it’s not sufficient to be able to handle complex workflows; you have to have a workflow that won’t confound any of its users and that will stay out of their way in that workflow.
kindness
I remember when they broke up MaBell into 5 or 6 entities. It didn’t get better. Now it’s all back together and it’s technologically better but service/costs it’s a tad worse. Thankfully there is competition in the cell markets. I think regulations & tax changes would me more effective in the short run. For instance, now several states have passed measures that a union needs to vote and get approval from it’s members to spend lobbying dollars. Corporations in those states have no such requirement. There should be. Force them to take a shareholder vote. Of course they’ll squeel, that’s waht they do. Every time. And there needs to be an Alternative Minimum Tax for corporations. That’d be a nice start.
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est: I think Trump’s election killed off nationalization as a policy. Do you want him in control of all that?
Baud
@rikyrah: I thought the Chinese were supposed to be helping Dems.
StringOnAStick
Since we’re talking software, does anyone have an idea about software that can do simple things with digital photos, like cropping and a little image tweaking. I don’t do enough, have enough time, or even want to entertain the idea of a monthly license for Photoshop and I need maybe 1% of what that giant expensive software does.
Another software upgrade horror story: we are semi-merging the adjacent dental office with ours, with the plan that in a few years we’ll buy that practice when their DDS retires and then fully merge. Both offices are moving to a new combined office space in a few months, but will remain separate practices though they share space and some equipment. The other office had not converted to digital anything, so doing so was part of the deal and my boss bought them digital X-ray sensors ($8,000 each), software licenses, etc. The killer was we had to upgrade to the newest form of our dental software in order to do this “semi-merged and eventually fully merged” dance. That forced an upgrade to Windows 10, which is now going to force purchasing new PC’s for each dental treatment room, the front desk and of course the network server. I’m figuring $100k of the cost of our move is just this stuff, not counting the monthly fees to have a computer guy on speed dial.
Momentary
@Baud: Eh. Theresa May is also a horrible human being, but she’s not “in control” of the NHS in any way that makes me think it should be privatized. The older I get the more I am in favour of nationalisation for basic infrastructure in general (so, the cables and pipes, roads and train tracks yes, the data centres no).
debbie
@StringOnAStick:
GraphicConverter. Not that expensive to begin with, but you can get a free tryout.
Eolirin
@debbie: I mean, I agree, and as a general UX principle that’s a super important thing. Though, trying to build something that won’t confound anyone is an impossible task.
You do need to target a specific type of person, with a specific type of workflow. So while Adobe products could be much better than they are, part of it is also that the intended user that they’re designing for and many of the actual users that end up having to interact with their products don’t match well, due to the lack of widely accepted alternatives.
Some of the solutions to pain points you run into would actually impede other workflows, where they’re less of an issue. And some of it is that changing a UX paradigm in an established piece of software even when better methods now exist is really disruptive to long term users of that software.
It’s a complicated problem.
PJ
@debbie: If, after the last three years, you don’t think Facebook is as big a threat to the fate of our country and the world as your examples as prime targets of antitrust, the oil and gas companies, I don’t know what to say.
plato
@Baud:
That’s the typical rethuglican
talking pointslies.Snark or not, I don’t see what is the point of repeating the rethugs’ pov. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
Baud
@plato: It’s called mockery. Get used to it.
Brickley Paiste
@StringOnAStick:
paint.net
Used to be free now I think it’s a few bucks after trial.
PJ
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: The criticism is that, like Walmart, Amazon is essentially a monopsony, forcing suppliers to work with one distributor that dominates the marketplace. This means that Amazon, like Walmart, can dictate the prices it pays to their suppliers, and drive them out of business if it likes where the goods are fungible (see all of the Amazon branded stuff they sell). I don’t know how true this is for every supplier of Amazon, but it’s definitely true for some of them.
Ohio Mom
@Immanentize: I hope you are right — I would be happy to be wrong.
Well, I don’t mean right about the economy slowing down, I mean about a Democrat having the winning message.
Brickley Paiste
@PJ:
YES!
People make hundreds (thousands?) of posts decrying Russian interference in our elections but then cheerfully log into Facebook – the primary tool the Russian’s used. And Facebook knew there were fake foreign accounts influencing the election in real time but did nothing. And then they denied knowing about it for months. And then they minimized the damage for months more. But got to keep up with my Knitting Group!!!
plato
@Baud: And it’s getting tiresome, so get used to some feedback.
plato
PJ
@Ohio Mom: I haven’t heard any of the declared candidates talking much about foreign policy, and it will take more than a decade to return America’s standing to where it was before his Presidency, if it is even possible.
mad citizen
I support a better regulatory model for tech/amazon. The federal regulators for electricity did this in the 1990s, requiring open access transmission tariffs to prevent games being played. Those have been followed by independent system operators who operate the grid, and do it efficiently through markets.
Heading to Hanoi today if any jackals have suggestions they would be welcome.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Eolirin:
No, it isn’t complicated. You continue to offer and service the old, already scaled products to those whose needs are met by it, instead of jamming new bloatware in order to keep programmers and managers and officer and shareholders paid. If you want to lure the already happy into upgrades, provide them with upgrades that have genuine utility.
piratedan
i for one am not going to sweat her details on her proposals as of yet, to be even bringing the conversation back out into the open is the conversation worth having… after living thru the chaos of the browser wars, it was a good thing until Microsoft found out how to actually rig the game and when they and google did that, they controlled the framing and instituted a new payola to get the web that was free to pay off on how your search features worked. When Fox saw that model, they then rigged the way that people get news now and hence that particular branch in the road has led to untold evil repercussions….just saying
plato
Kay
It happened with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Before that we put in fire codes, electric codes. Builders adapted beautifully.
It’s so funny how Schulz sees himself as this optimistic example of free markets and he’s actually relentlessly negative. All he does is criticize others and say “no”. It’s all doom and gloom- “don’t even try anything, it won’t work”
I don’t think he’s that well informed so someone should try to trip him up. Describe a currently existing rule or law as if it’s a proposal and get him to say it sucks, will never pass and won’t work anyway.
Miss Bianca
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: You have obviously never dealt with Amazon as a merchant trying to sell things. I have, and that’s the reason I will never, ever buy from them as a customer unless I literally cannot find qhat I am looking for through any other means. They are a nightmare to deal with – they put absolutely no effort into their back end software, their tech help is largely a joke, and forget it if there us a customer dispute – no matter what level of documentation you produce, you the merchant, are ALWAYS wrong, and the customer is ALWAYS right, facts and circumstances be damned. And you have to live in constant terror of being dinged or suspended for stupid shit beyond your control – some asshole posts an unreasonable complaint, delivery gets delayed because of storms. It is a shitty system. Amazon can DIAF – a nice, anti–trust regulatory fire. The sooner the better.
plato
@piratedan:
Good point, however m$ and pox news over leveraged (or greedy) and are seeing lower ror but google still seems to survive that concept.
Immanentize
@Ohio Mom:
I think different Dems will take different messages. I mean, Seth Fucking Moulton thinks that his military past makes him the ideal Presidential candidate….
That said, I really cannot think of one President who won on foreign relationship acumen over their competitor who ran more on domestic policy arguments.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@mad citizen:
I loved Hanoi. Go to the flower markets if you can. Also, practice your Frogger skills on the plane before arrival – crossing streets can be a challenge.
The name of the bun cha place that Obama and Bourdain ate at is Huong Lien. They offer a “Combo Obama” for 85000 dong (about 3.50) – it’s a bowl of noodles and meat with all the trimmings, a fried seafood roll and a Ha Noi beer. It’s awesome, and will fill you up.
Enjoy – it is a delightful place and the people are warm and welcoming.
Incitatus for Senate
@Eolirin:
Actually, this is categorically not true. iOS devices have the most powerful processors in the industry, which regularly beat the pants off the Snapdragons that Android phones use.
Momentary
@Miss Bianca: It seems to me that eBay is the interesting contrast to Amazon, and a good example of the kind of platform vs platform user divide Warren is promoting? I remember when they used to be included in people’s lists of Problematic Big Tech but now it seems like they’re flourishing quietly under the radar?
Baud
@plato: Ditto to you.
Emma
Lots of good ideas here. Why don’t you send them to Warren? There’s a dialog waiting to happen. You could be the one that starts it.
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
One of the things people worry about, not just with Amazon but with all huge companies, is there are fewer little guys. There are fewer small businesses, and small businesses were a way to obtain a middle class lifestyle wit reasonable start-up costs.
I’m sure you;ve seen this in your practice. I’ll just give you one example in mine. A 2 person powerwashing company. They have an industrial powerwasher and they get contracts with supermarkets to wash the windows and exterior. These two bid and got contracts with Aldi. They were grossing like 500k a year, they bust ass and they have crazy fuel costs because they have to drive to these places, hundreds of miles, but still. Two people who are paying themselves 60 or 70k a year. There’s now a national “big”- a powerwashing company. They’re taking over. They’ll utterly dominate too.
So it’s one more “ladder to the middle class” that is being pulled up. You cannot, in fact, bust ass and get ahead. You can’t even get in. You’ll be an employee of a large company or you won’t work.
Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot
@Chris Johnson:
Yeah, this seems pretty bloody obvious to me as the 30,000 ft view of the topic at hand. I would say, however, that “people” (i.e., First World people) don’t love “capitalism” – almost all of us love living a modern life (even if by “love” what is really meant is “would not countenance living a harder, less safe, more primitive existence”). Capitalism is generally understood to be the primary engine of that modern life, and it certainly is (though that engine could only run has it has on cheap fossil fuels, for which – sadly – there were no alternatives).
Do you believe that sufficient reform of late stage capitalism is actually going to happen, though, to prevent the “revolution, destruction, and enormous backslides into more primitive conditions” that I agree are inevitable otherwise? I think there’s no chance that anything close to sufficient reform will be done by our civilization, and the U S of A will remain the prime exemplar of “deny and, at most, piss into the wind” till we’re a rump police-state (if we’re lucky) uneasily protected, after a fashion, by the two oceans and our nukes.
It’s surviving and adapting to civilization’s coming collapse that will be the work of the future. Collectively, humankind will do far too little far too late to preclude that collapse, because the couple billion of us who are living at least fairly-modern lives are not willing to reduce that standard of living sufficiently (not most of us, anyway), and the billions more who are striving to get where we’re at are not going to stop striving till that no longer works.
Emma
@Momentary: ebay makes a lot of its cash on ripping off the seller. At least that’s what I’ve had friends who use it say.
Baud
@Kay: They always have the same talking points. We can’t trust them to be part of the conversation. We have to figure out the best thing to do on our own.
Chetan Murthy
It seems to me there’s a misconception about what “breakin up” AMZN/MSFT/GOOG’s cloud platforms would entail. There’s nothing about doing that, that should cause any problems whatsoever to their operation. Nothing. Why? Because the real value there isn’t in the machines — it’s in the software and the groups that extend/maintain/operate that software. Duplicate the software, break the groups in half, and make two companies: let them compete against each other. Divide up the datacenters (as units) between the two companies.
If they’re so much superior to all the other companies in the biz, they’ll kill off all the competition, and go at each others’ throats — with the benefit going to us consumers.
Amir Khalid
@Immanentize:
Nowadays, of course, the phone is yours and you carry it in your pocket. But you’re still paying for a new phone again and again.
chopper
@Kay:
his attitude is representative of a huge population of douchelords we have to deal with regarding climate change. oh sure, it’s real, but nobody’s going to want to do anything about it so we should all just go home.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@jeffreyw: Thank you for the sunshine that grackle reflects. While impressively ignoring the cardinal across the way.
Momentary
@Emma: I’ve sold on ebay and I did wince at the cut they take, but it seemed entirely straightforward without tricks or manipulations. But I’m only an occasional seller.
Amir Khalid
@Chetan Murthy:
But it’s like blowing up an asteroid, isn’t it? After a while, the broken-up entity will re-consolidate via merger/acquisition, as AT&T did, and still be coming at you as big and dangerous as before.
Immanentize
@Amir Khalid:
Well you know the Maker Mantra — if you can’t open it or fix it, you don’t own it.
plato
Momentary
@Chetan Murthy: Specialised hardware design from the chip level to the datacentre level matters plenty, and datacentre location matters a lot too (power and cooling are optimisation issues at all levels). What the big players do to run their clouds is a very different ballgame from what the little guys do.
Baud
@plato: See, mockery. It works.
jeffreyw
@StringOnAStick: I love owls and hearing them hoot in the night is one of those summer sounds that pairs well with crickets.
We don’t actually see them as often as I would like but one has spent a little time watching us back.
Brachiator
@Baud: Coming back late to the thread.
Yep. Good point. Warren has an overly elaborate solution in search of a problem.
plato
@Baud: Those tweets turning rwnj lies against the rethugs is mockery but repeating rethugs’ constant lies about dems is not mockery or even self-deprecation, see?
Kay
@Baud:
Right. I just thought it was funny because it’s often actually true of people who built their own business, that they are optimistic and sort of cheerleaders by nature. it’s what’s attractive about them. It’s why they’re good salespeople.
But, Christ not that one. He’s dour. His whole thing is finger-wagging and scolding. What a treat that he decided to launch this national campaign to scold and lecture us! I’m honored.
Mike J
@Chetan Murthy:
Google’s consumers aren’t its users. Users are a resource to be mined to extract value to sell to advertisers. If you make google a more efficient machine, its customers will benefit at the expense of end users.
Baud
@plato: Those tweets are based on GOP lies. It’s the same thing in different form. It’s far worse to repeat that migrants are invaders than to mock the fact that GOP accusations against Dems are all confessions.
@Kay: He’s awful. Bloomberg would have been a better independent billionaire.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Eolirin: Thank you. I’d be quite wealthy if I had a nickel for every person who told me “you just don’t understand enough about tech ” when I’d point out the market share component. And if I counted the ones who didn’t sneer when they said it, I’d have even more money.
Kay
@chopper:
“As everyone knows, it is IMPOSSIBLE to force changes in building”. Except for the fact that we’ve done it over and over and over, on everything from access for people with disabilities to earthquakes.
Tell him to look at the aisle width or the bathroom in a Starbucks. We forced him to build it like that.
Immanentize
@Baud: not worth your time, there, friend.
That guy’s a Jackass.
(Using quote as mockery of third party)
mad citizen
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Thank you, I’ll be with a few others I’m meeting, 3 work days but Mon and Fri are free so I’m sure we’ll enjoy it.
Eolirin
@Incitatus for Senate: The appreciable gain from that is negliable given the needs of mobile apps, they have worse cameras, less ram, similar or worse screens and less storage, on average. They’ve almost always lagged on new innovations. And to be clear, I’m not saying they’re bad phones. I’m saying you can’t compete with their margins by making better phones.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: All of this. I HATE Office 365 to an admittedly irrational degree – for all the functional reasons you note.
And of course I still pine daily for WordPerfect.
Immanentize
@Kay:
How true! If I wrote articles for magazines or even blogs, it would be fun to gather all his negative comments in one place and call it,
“No Can Do Schultz.”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: One person’s utility is another’s bloat.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho:
Of course, you’re an attorney.
(In a past life I did tech support for lawyers.)
Immanentize
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho:
Ahhh, Word Perfect. I still use it occasionally, if only to convert old docs. Reveal codes!
I saw this happening when every new laptop included Word. All the students in law schools got new laptops. All the lawyers and professors used WP. The market share and the students won out.
At my University, every student now gets a free 360 package.
solitare
@Another Scott:
Amazon vs Newegg vs Ebay does not work how most people think it does.
Let’s take a mid range laptop, aka a macbook pro, vs a high end laptop aka an ASUS gaming one, and a workstation class super high end laptop like a Dell.
In the case of apple they set an MSRP sell it direct, but you can also get it through Newegg, Amazon, or ebay for all the same price as the suppliers all those three use are the same. The price won’t really vary. In the case of ASUS they don’t sell direct, but the same people shipping them put them on Amazon, ebay, or Newegg at all the same price. In the case of a super high end workstation class Dell laptop for CAD/CAM type stuff (these are well into five figures) that only exists on Dell direct and is strictly a business level machine.
For a major electronics vendor with a name backing in it with a specific product (mid range user apple, high end user ASUS, workstation professional class Dell) the market place doesn’t really matter. These things have a set value and set cost to them and are strictly controlled by the manufacturer and if they will back the product if it was bought through vendor X. So ASUS, Newegg, and ebay will all give you the same price for a new one or simply aren’t allowed to carry it at all.
Emma
@Momentary: I’m glad to hear it because my sister and I are faced with dealing with our Mother’s hoards and we were considering eBay.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Immanentize: Reveal Codes.
I’d also have a nice bank account if I had a nickel for every time in a work day I silently screamed “I need reveal codes” when I’m reading something from one of the main offices.
Ruckus
@debbie:
This.
Gets to the basic idea of why one might break up companies.
Breaking up Apple or Microsoft will do little except raise the price of goods that we all use every day, such as the range of computers/systems we are all using to write these comments. And there is competition in the software/hardware market. Sure there are only two phone operating systems, but there are three major computer operating systems for the systems we mostly use. One doesn’t have to purchase a $700 iPhone. There are lots of options that work.
This sounds like a solution in search of a problem. We do have issues that affect us all and that could possibly be helped by less integration in the companies that this seems to be about, as you mention, energy, how it’s produced, how it’s sold/transported/maintained/paid for. We all use energy to exist these days, have for a very long time. Money is another. Banks are not evil as a rule but allowing them to grow such that their business practices harm lots of people and control much of our lives is a problem.
Sure everyone seems to require a smart phone, so that they can stare at it whenever their eyes are open, but the reality is that we can all live without one. Energy and Money are two things we can’t live without. And which have been manipulated to make this a twisted world, people without a lot of money can’t afford the energy to get to a job that pays shit.
I’d rather that the basic issues were worked on, so that all of us had at least the opportunity to have a minimum life. Healthcare, Energy, Money, Voting…….
solitare
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
365 is a business based product, for home use you can still buy 2016 and 2019. The advancements are behind the scenes stuff that really matter for developers (teams, one drive, sharepoint, and exchange integration for one) and for systems administrators being able to assign items to users at will. It’s vastly superior at the enterprise level… which is where the really money is. You can get an office 2019 key for about 60 bucks online if you are a home user.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho:
I actually search up old emails on my iPhone in the mail function and rema them to myself so I can access the lousy things.
As to WordPerfect, I stopped creating docs in it about 25 years ago. Probably stopped having any use for translation of old material 15-20 years ago.
solitare
@Incitatus for Senate:
No iOS devices have faster procs than what you are used to seeing. Their ARM cpus and their gpus get smoked in the mobile space by high end products from companies you may not hear of. Outside of the iPad Pro apples smart phone and tablet hardware is decidedly middle of the road.
Brickley Paiste
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Since you do IR:
http://ctein.com/Prince_Albert.htm
Guy was having a print sale over at Online Photographer
Momentary
@Ruckus: I agree with you but consider that Information and Communication need to be on that list of basic issues too.
Chetan Murthy
@Momentary:
Yes, everything you say is correct. But the idea that there are literally only one or two people in the world who can do any of these things is ludicrous. The hardware design, btw, is *also* “software” in the sense that it can be duplicated and handed-off to both companies. There are lots of data-centers, and it’s not like only a few of them are power-efficient, right? Divvy them up!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Eolirin: One of the ways Apple keeps their user base is via their messaging platform(iMessage and Facetime), you can’t get that on Windoze or Android.
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid:
This is true. But it’s (a) not a reason to *not* break ’em up (look at all the advantages that we still have, b/c AT&T got transiently dismembered) and (b) it’s up to us to ensure that the mergers aren’t greenlighted by government.
I mean, if we believe that government can’t function, then there’s really no point, is there? Just roll over on our backs and invite our overlords to gut us like fish, right?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brickley Paiste: Nice shot.
Momentary
@Emma: Good luck! I also had to deal with disposal of a hoarding mother’s worldly goods, so you have all my sympathy. I think the thing to do is weigh the cut that eBay takes against the convenience and reach that they offer, compared to Craigslist or whatever is similar in your area that doesn’t take a cut.
Ruckus
@Emma:
You have two basic platforms (there are others, these are the two most known) ebay and craigslist.
Ebay uses the 10% they take partially to pay for the system that works. Craigslist just lists the latest items posted, and has no real way to search for a particular item or a way to look over all. Sure it’s free but you get what you pay for. Ebay works in many parts of the world, craigslist is mainly local, hard to search, hard to find specific items, and with the way it is structured if your stuff doesn’t sell right away, pretty useless.
Kelly
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Capital punishment seems to be aimed at the wrong crimes. Doesn’t really discourage murders probably because murderers aren’t running on the same logic most of us are using. Summary execution for shining more than two headlights or illegally bright headlights into the eyes of oncoming drivers would put a swift end to that curse.
Chetan Murthy
@debbie:
I’d note that even back in the 1960s (1969, IIRC) the government was concerned about monopoly in the I/T biz (IBM). And we know that the same was true in the telecommunications biz many decades ago. The importance, reach, and power of tech companies today far exceeds anything, anything, *ANYTHING* we experienced back then. And our government can walk and chew gum at the same time: there’s no reason why tech should be exempted.
To those who argue that this will merely increase prices, I’d note that the US is well-known to have really shitty broadband compared to other OECD countries. It’s not as if all this monopoly is helping us all. And the same argument (from price) could have been made back when AT&T was broken-up, and yet it *did* drive down prices for consumers.
Amir Khalid
@Chetan Murthy:
tI think the corporate breaking up will need to be repeated every decade or so.
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid:
Can’t disagree with you. The invisible hand doesn’t just allocate resources efficiently (in our optimistic dreams), it’s also (and always) trying to pick your pocket.
Momentary
@Chetan Murthy: The UK has done the breaking up for broadband, forcing BT to split off infrastructure to OpenReach, and it really hasn’t helped. Speaking as a person still on sub 1Mb ADSL, I’m pretty sure nationalisation is the real remedy needed, not forced splitting.
M31
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho:
I yearn for Reveal Codes every day *sniff*
lol I almost went back to using TeX for basic wordprocessing but unless you’re a scientist (humanities academic here but used to typeset science papers as a side job) it’s just too cumbersome — I still might do it out of contrarian rage though
Ruckus
@Momentary:
Wasn’t a complete list, those seem to be good additions. Life is different today, from 50-60 yrs ago, mostly from the technology companies that give us things we don’t really need, but seem to want worst of all, a way to make life a bit more expansive, a bit less work for food/shelter – there wasn’t really anything else. The basics have gotten a bit more available, unless you get paid shit to produce the basics.
What I’m saying is that if it was me, I’d worry far less about tech companies and far more about making life available for the majority of people. There will always be rich people, there will always be assholes and grifters. There will always be people who can’t work as well or as much or as effective, but that shouldn’t limit them in actual living. Sure they won’t own an 8000 sq ft home on a couple of acres but they shouldn’t have to live in a tent or a broken down slum either. Basic life has been separated into Excess, or You can’t have any.
We should work on this before we work on making life a little teeny bit better or worse for people that wouldn’t know anyway.
Momentary
@Ruckus: Yes, I think that’s right. I have trouble getting too fussed about Big Tech as monopoly because the main victim seems to be the advertising industry, and I’m not at all sure I’m against hurting the advertising industry. But Big Tech as platform for out of control propaganda and reality manipulation can really fuck up our efforts to work on making life available for the majority of people, so I think we do have to treat it as a priority problem. But I’m not sure that splitting things up will actually help that problem — sort of like trying to treat a rabies infection with surgery!
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
Actually I just moved and have a pipeline that is blazingly fast, and at less cost than my previous provider. From 30 up, 10 down to 200 up and down. I could pay for far faster. It isn’t so much the size of the company it’s that the investment the old provider makes is in advertising rather than in technology. We need to demand better technology that already exists rather than break up tech companies. BTW the complex I live in is fully optically provided and was built 25 yrs ago. The building I moved from was a far more expensive area and the building is about 10 yrs old.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
How much is FaceBook and Google charging these days?
People hate Amazon, if they hate them at all, for the way they treat their workers. I haven’t seen anyone suggest that Amazon’s prices would be lower it they were broken up.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
And this includes things like infrastructure, our roads/bridges/internet mostly sucks donkey balls. They are finally painting all the track canopies at Union Station in LA. It’s only been what looks like a couple of decades since it was done last. The revival of trains as commuter transportation has done wonders for the infrastructure involved. But of course many fight that because they don’t/won’t use public transportation. Ride the train with the common riff-raff, not on your life, there might be people on there that don’t look like me.
Momentary
@Brachiator: Some hate them for the death of local bookstores, although that doesn’t seem to get as much airplay these days.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus:
There’s an old story about tech companies (and this is true of all of them: the story was told at AT&T Research, about AT&T (“taxing photons”) but it’s just as true of IBM, and probably all the other tech monopolies): their pricing power is limited by the ability-to-pay of their customers. That’s effectively a money spigot, b/c for a customer, switching is nontrivially expensive. And the actual -marginal cost- of providing the service is far, far lower than the price that’s charged. That’s why it’s called “taxing photons” (I didn’t make up the name). So what happens to all that extra money? It goes to fund R&D, new ventures, etc. And who gets that money? Why, the ones who are most able to -sell- the idea that they’ll produce the Next Big Thing. But that’s almost never a matter of technical merit: it’s about politics.
I’ve seen this from inside a big tech company (19yr) and the amount of money that can get wasted is literally mind-boggling: billions of dollars at the company I worked at. I used to joke that if my employer could only *double* its ROI on R&D …. from 5% to 10%, they’d make a *killing*. And I’m sure I was generous when I said 5%. This is why big tech companies “innovate” by buying startups: because they can’t actually innovate internally — their internal politics are so sclerotic that they really can’t manage it. All the best-run of them can manage to do, is to incrementally improve their businesses, and even that, as a company gets older, becomes impossible.
So now back to your example of broadband: I also switched (from AT&T, 6mbps) to Monkeybrains (60mbps sometimes, 24mbps always *grIn*) and this is exactly what *competition* brings us. Look: tech companies are feudally-run empires internally. There are Dukes and Counts jockeying for their bits of the empire, and they don’t actually care about improving things for their customers. What they care about, is justifying their own pay-packets. And that’s all. And especially in tech, where the most important asset is intellectual property, we (as a *public*) should be assiduous in dividing/duplicating that IP, to foster competition.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
And yet they removed a lot of the seating (because of homeless people and petty thieves, etc.) and made Union Station less welcoming and less fun.
This is a mixed blessing. It is expensive to maintain the system, and the LA area is so freaking huge that it is difficult to adequately connect buses to the train to get people to and from their ultimate destination. Delays and down time for track maintenance has increased. And yet, the Metro leadership is committed to ditzy schemes to try to “force people” onto trains and buses.
The Metrolink service is slowy, but steadily becoming unprofitable and unreliable. When trains go out of service because of “mechanical problems,” they end up offering riders $50 vouchers to use for Uber or Lyft. This is not sustainable.
A couple of days ago, a commuter posted a photo of feces on the seats of a Gold Line train. Riff-raff is the least of the system’s problems.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Is it possible that Apple sells it’s phones for more and because you can go to an Apple store and get knowledgeable sales/service? The latest iPhone is $700 and they sell seemingly all they make. A Samsung 9 is $170 less on Amazon.
Apple makes more not only because of the product but because of the sales experience. And their sales experience is not my cup of tea, but it works. They sell an entire system, their entire system works together for different experience than most who try to sell a phone for the least amount. And I question that all the other companies are losing money. How are they staying in business? I’ve owned 2 businesses, yes very, very small in comparison but all businesses have one thing in common, you can’t keep the doors open if you don’t at least break even and you can’t grow if you don’t make a profit. You don’t have to do either every minute of every day but if you don’t overall, the doors will close. And no one who owns/runs a company likes to lose money – no one, anywhere in the world. Anyone who runs a business stands a chance to lose any day of the year but they don’t like it and can’t do it for ever.
solitare
@Momentary:
Specialized hardware? Not true for the most part. Most data centers run off intel xeons or amd equivilant running samsung intel or micron flash based main storage, they also all use intel 10gb interconnects (fibre or copper) and use nvidia or amd gpu acceleration. The chipsets are all intel or amd designed as well and the few raid controller companies their are for mass disk based storage boil down to LSI or intel again.
In some cases, you get IBM PPC based stuff or SUN SPARC (aka Fujitsu) but this is very rare and high end.
Where you do get customization at that scale is google and facebook who have the cash to run some custom ASICs but even then the vast majority of what they are doing is x86/64 cpu cores from the two main players, nand from the main players, and accelerators from the main players. The entire tech space is monopolies. All your cell phone and tablet cpu’s are ARM based, only three companies make DRAM (one of which is LOL samsung), only two companies make x86 chips, intel, qualcomm, and broadcomm basically make all your communications chips.
Software is much less of a monopoly even though it may seem to be worse. That’s because almost nobody actually knows who really makes all shit that went into their laptop or pda, and not realizing it doesn’t matter if you buy a macbook or a dell you’re buying chips, ram, capacitors, cpus, circuit boards, networking chips, wifi, lte chips, batteries, from the same handful of companies and most of them are Asian giants that do not have to deal with monopoly issues, it’s embraced there. Because anyone can make software, it takes a multi billion conglomerate to fabricate dram, cpus, or nand flash. That macbook and that dell at the same price range all have an intel cpu, intel chipset, amd gpu, intel wifi, intel thunderbolt, realtek soundcard, samsung ram, samsung or lg display, samsung ssd, and odds are a sony battery. The circuit board was built at foxconn who also assembled the entire thing. The capacitors are japanese (I forget the corp that’s doing all that now) and your trackpad is probably synaptics. There is no difference in what’s in them and it’s all the same shit from the same giants. Shit most LED panels are just made by three companies and OLED has like two you get one from. If it’s not JOLED or LG they got their OLED from them. LG, auoptronics, samsung, pretty much make each screen in each laptop and each monitor and each TV out there. Buy a Sony TV, Sony didn’t make that screen or design it. Buy a macbook, apple didn’t make that screen or design it. Here though Sony is better than apple as they do make production monitors, if you have five or six figure to spend and a corporate account, they are used for production and 8k is the name of the game here and it’s stuff they won’t sell you and you can’t afford.
The only electronics area you can buy into as a consumer which is done by a little guy is headphones in the 500-10000 dollar range, or home audio systems than start at 10000 and can get well over a hundred grand. And that’s not more innovative than our monopoly space. Progress is slow and the high cost is that everything is a custom job and actually hand made by well paid technicians and craftsmen. But I doubt anybody that cares about monopoly spent 500 or a couple grand, I bet they spent 200 bucks on crappy airpods from apple or just used what came with their phone.
Sorry on a rant, this a topic that speaks to me as I work in tech and have to deal with a lot of idiocy about it on a day to day basis as part of my job.
solitare
@Ruckus:
Iphone sales are down because of price and their support is notoriously the worst in the industry and they lie to people. They have a caged support model though so even if you are a large corp (we made 34 billion last year) you have to send it back to them and let them decide. They are by far the worst in the business here.
They sell as a status symbol and cultural signaling, and they aren’t shy about it and they milk it. Just like Rolex. It’s not that good of a watch, but people who know shit about watches think it is, and the inflated price is the point of it, their support is also over priced and abysmal but the point is that you are seen with a Rolex, not that a Rolex is really all that good.
Ruckus
@BellyCat:
We use Solidworks and I have to say that 45 yrs ago when the computer software design business was getting off the ground, they were crap. As was almost everyone else. There are other systems out there but Solidworks does exactly that, it works. The company stuck with the product, developed it, made it far easier to use and far more valuable. As far as I can tell they didn’t drive anyone out of the market or buy up everyone else, they did exactly what companies are supposed to do, make a better product. It’s like the argument about Apple/Microsoft. Apple makes a better product. Is it perfect? Of course not but it is better and easier to use. Is it different to use? To a degree yes it is. But I’ve been involved in computers for those 45 yrs, in design and mgf and the experience with Apple is better overall, just the way that the Solidworks experience is better overall. What should tell you that is that I hadn’t really designed anything in 25 yrs and sat down at a Solidworks box and could use it in minutes. Yes I’m not an expert in any sense of the word but I can use the system. And it’s far, far more involved than it was 45 yrs ago, when it had a different name and actually cost more. It’s popular because it works and they fix stuff and it works well and is intuitive for the most part.
Momentary
@solitare: “Where you do get customization at that scale is google and facebook” – which is exactly what we are discussing. Hope you enjoyed getting that rant off your chest though ;)
Brachiator
@Momentary:
Wasn’t it Crown Books and Borders that put pressure on local bookstores long before Amazon became dominant?
Momentary
@Brachiator: To an extent no doubt. I think there was a perception that indy locals could compete with chain locals by offering a different sort of in-store experience, but then Amazon killed both indies and chains on price, bringing an end to the local bricks and mortar bookstore as a physical place to go, whether indy or chain. Oversimplified I am sure, and my tiny town now supports three indy bookstores (one of which is specialised entirely for books about fishing), so perhaps the indies have learned to adapt.
Ruckus
@germy:
You are both absolutely right and wrong here. There is a lot of change for changes sake. But there is also a lot of change when dead ends are reached. This here blog is an example. It was written at a time when the systems it ran on didn’t do as much as they do today and couldn’t work as well and some of that was the hardware that it ran on. But now it’s run it’s course and needs to be rebuilt to be functional again. And cheese can be made the old fashioned way, the way it’s been made for centuries or it can be made in factories that can make a lot more. And as there are far more of us there is a market for more cheese. So do we still make cheese in only the old fashioned way, by hand, in small lots, and pay a lot for it, or do we also make it in factories so that more people can maybe enjoy it? Our world is changing and at an ever faster pace than it has in the past. Is that better or worse, or just different? In my grandfathers life he went from crossing the country in a horse drawn wagon to seeing men on the moon. In my fathers life he went from world war to world war with all machines being run manually by one man to machines that can run at the press of a button, machines that are far more accurate and repeatable. I’ve gone from propeller planes to being able to fly around the world in comfort, to a car that costs 10 times as much but works 20 times better, lasts longer etc, etc to talking to you on a computer, the likes of which didn’t exist when I was born. I’ve never met you, probably never will in person but I can have a long conversation with you over thousands of miles. Even the telephone doesn’t do that, I need to know your number. Here just type on a screen.
Is it better? Who the hell knows? Is it more interesting? Yes. Life is far, far different than when I was born and yet cheese can still be made the same way. People die every day from cancer, but not near as big a percentage as used to. I’m living proof that life is better even if it isn’t perfect. And it ain’t perfect, boy it ain’t perfect. But so is most everyone else, proof that life is better, if not anywhere near as good as it should be for everyone. Life isn’t perfect and as long as it’s made up of imperfect people (and there are a lot of imperfect people out there, some far more imperfect than others) it never will be. What it will be is ever changing and probably at an even faster rate than it was in our or our forefathers time.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Wasn’t it Amazon that was started to sell books to places that didn’t have a lot of book stores in the first place? And wasn’t if far more successful than anyone, including Jeff imagined?
Citizen Alan
@Baud:
The recent Tumblr controversy springs to mind. As I understand what happened, the people who own Tumblr wanted to get into the Apple Store. The Apple Store won’t allow porn. So Tumblr purged itself of all pornographic Tumblr pages. And since there were over a million Tumblr pages, the way they went about the purge was to use an algorithm they’d created to identify pornography that had less discernment than a five-year-old child. Because I’m pretty sure that a five-year-old child can tell the difference between a woman’s bare breasts and the Cookie Monster’s eyes.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
As a frequent user of the Metro and surrounding systems there certainly are issues. There are people involved, there will be issues. But I’d ask why would someone shit on the train? Is it that there are little choices around? Union Station is an example. Two restrooms in the entire place, one at each end. The station is old, it was opened in 1939 when the population of LA county was less than 3 million, while now it is estimated at just less than 12 million, in the same square area. LA county is now more populated than 41 states. There is almost no ability to build the best line possible, almost all the Metro system runs on right of ways from 100 yrs ago. And our unwillingness to include a lot of our citizens in the growth of our country means that there are a lot of people who live outside the norm. Way outside the norm. And what do we do about that? We shuffle them as much out of sight as possible, rather than find any way to involve them in modern life. Right now in this country you either have enough money to belong or you get forced out. And life doesn’t work that way for a percentage of humans, they become the displaced. They get to see the world around them, the $50K pickup trucks, the $80K cars, the million $ homes, and they can’t compete. It may be for a lot of reasons but it grinds people down, it makes them bitter and it gives them no where to sleep or shit. What do we do about this? Ignore it till it gets far worse? So far ignoring it hasn’t worked. Arrest people for it? So far making criminals out of them hasn’t worked. Attempt to fix it or at least mitigate it a lot better? There’s an idea.
NotMax
@StringOnAStick
Irfanview. Have been using it for twenty years, always has been free. Small footprint on your computer and does what it does like a champ. Tip: Download the (also free) plug-ins as well. Not necessarily things you’ll make use of regularly but nevertheless handy to have as options.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Need an outrage fix? Vox continues their unfortunate Wilmer-fluffing, with a turd of an article headlined The anti-Bernie Sanders campaign being pushed by former Clinton staffers, explained.
To give you a flavor, this piece of crap concluded with this gem:
Fuck you, Vox, for publishing this shit. (Signed, your loyal reader Formerly Disgruntled)
NotMax
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
Right with you on missing WordPerfect. Intuitive without being clunky, elaborate without being fussy.
Redshift
Chris Hayes had a great episode of his podcast about the big tech companies recently (you can also read the transcript at the link.) One of the points was that they haven’t run afoul of antitrust concerns because current legal thinking about monopoly power is that it’s only a problem if you use it against consumers, and the tech companies mostly use their monopoly power against business users of their platform and competitors.
Redshift
@NotMax: Absolutely. We still have WP on our home computer, and use it for anything that doesn’t need to be sent to someone else. (Plus, it’s export to Word format is quite good, unlike Word’s export to WordPerfect, which is complete crap.)
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
There could be a lot of reasons.
This is separate from the problems with shitting on a train. Metro deliberately decided to omit restrooms at Metro stations because of the cost, and concerns that they would be used for illicit purposes. As a result, some people shit on trains and use the elevators as their personal toilets. Local businesses often refuse to let anyone who is not a customer use their restrooms.
But there was much more traffic from passenger trains back then.
Some of the old right of way is perfectly suited for Metro trains. The Gold Line is a good example. And the Gold Line expansion has been so successful that it is eating into Foothill Transit bus ridership going towards Azusa, and also threatening to eat into some Metrolink ridership.
But the larger problem is that the metropolitan area is just too large and transit times are too long, especially if your destination is roughly diagonal. Uber and Lyft have actually helped somewhat.
More imaginative transit leadership might help. Metro didn’t see the point of rapid buses, which was pushed by a citizens’ group based on the success of these lines in some cities in Brazil. And of course, there were stupid, selfish and corrupt deals that prevented the Green Line from adequately serving beach cities or having stations and LAX. A plan to have the Red Line stop directly in Universal Studios was defeated by Universal and others.
There are also attempts to fight off smaller commuter services that might be independent of Metro.
I don’t know. How many of these people are there, what are their needs, and can they reasonably be served?
WhatsMyNym
Just a quick reminder that no tech or social media company made Fortune’s top 10 global companies by revenue for 2018.
Amazon’s profit margin for 2018 was 4.33%, better than most of the big chains like Walmart and Kroger.
For comparison, 3M’s was 16.33%
Sister Golden Bear
I agree that companies using internal, non-public sales information and using their position as the retailer to undercut competitors of those new products is problematic.
But it’s also not a unique problem. As others have pointed out numerous retailers — Costco, Macys, Target, grocery stores, etc. — offer house brands that compete with competitors’ products that they also sell. E.g. just as Amazon can give its own product preferred status in its search results, brick and mortar retailers can give the most desirable shelf space to their own products. I’m curious what regulations, if any, exist to avoid unfair competitor in these cases.
As far software payment models, I’ve been trying out an elegant new UX prototype tool (Protopie for those who are interested), which has an interesting model. Your initial purchase guarantees you a perpetuity license of the version you bought, plus a year of upgrades. Then you pay annually for additional upgrades. If you stop paying the annual fee, then you can continue using whatever latest version you had.
For them it makes sense, since they’re a start-up that’s less than two years old (and coincidentally a competitor just went out of business after five years), so I’m much happier to plunk down $99 knowing that even if they go under, I can continue using their software.
But, I suspect they may change that down the road. The reason Adobe and others have switched to a subscription model is that it’s much better for their revenue stream — from their POV there were too many customers like myself who had an older version of Photoshop that was sufficient and didn’t bother upgrading.
OTOH, the need for upgrade fees/subscription fees are one key factor in software becoming bloatware — it’s impossible to charge the former and difficult to justify the latter unless you’re making “improvements.” (And no, back-end improvements are rarely seen by customers as worth fees.)
Internally, it also goes against some extremely deep corporate psychology for most tech companies — who are loath to admit that a product is sufficient developed that is no longer requires innovation and has moved to a stable cash cow status.
That makes it hard hard even when there isn’t fees at stake. At my company we had a “simple” version of a product creation tool — and it was a bit of a fight to keep it simple — even though we made our money off the products customers created with the tool, not the tool itself. Fortunately, in that case, we also had the “complex” version, which we were able to channel feature request into. Although that one ended up becoming too power user-oriented and we’re having to do a rethink to simplify it.
Likewise, it’s much harder to get programmers interested in supporting a product that’s in maintenance mode. Programmers, in my experience here in Silicon Valley, like to think of themselves as creating cool new stuff — and patching bugs and refactoring code ain’t that.
Momentary
@Sister Golden Bear: And promotion committees for programmers tend to be hugely and reflexively biased toward creating cool new stuff. Very hard to get promoted for refactoring and patching when your promo committee is asking what you’ve shipped/launched. IMHO a lot of dysfunctional software design is due to those fucked up internal motivators and metrics, more than to real active decisionmaking.
worn
@Baud: @StringOnAStick: I have been using Irfanview for years. It is free, has a small footprint and is really fast. It has a small set of tools for basic image processing but can also utilize plugins (Photoshop filters, for example). There are also other nice features like easily set up slide shows, batch processing of images (ie, ‘resize every image in this directory to 1280 x 960, brighten a hair & save them as png files’).
Irfanview
NotMax
@Redshift
For everyday text editing, my go-to has always been Metapad. Sadly, no version for Windows 10.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
I used WordPerfect all the time. Loved it. Now I use Word at work and Word or google docs at home. Life goes on.
I know people who miss Wordstar and Multimate. But apart from a nostalgia buzz, it doesn’t much matter.
Most businesses adopted Word because they were excessively cautious and Word got pitched as the “industry standard.”
Steve in the ATL
@kindness:
I love that idea!
Steve in the ATL
@mad citizen:
Yeah—don’t tell raven!
BellyCat
@Ruckus: SolidWorks was purchased by Catia (currently wrangling my kid so I can’t look up the year) and the current model is that every year they come out with a new version and it will not even say backwards to the prior version — so all collaborators MUST upgrade. It’s a pretty good program but forced upgrades is now necessary for collaboration.
As I understand it, the original people who started solidWorks are now on their own, for the most part, and they started a cloud-based 3-D modeling program called OnShape. It has a lot of promise.
sgrAstar
@Eolirin: that is SOP in retailing. REI, for example, is just as guilty as Amazon of predating on their suppliers/vendors. Not justifying that behavior at all…just observing that survival in any market where one or two players dominate requires speed, brains, and really good bidness skillz.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chetan Murthy: There you are, quoting from that commie book that no real capitalist woud ever read.
Ruckus
@BellyCat:
Catia has been in the software design business since the inception of computer design. They always had that business model. They purchased Solidworks because it was better than their own. Most design (as well as mfg) software has been this way since day one, which was about 45 yrs ago. New concepts, ideas, fixes and better ways of doing things are found all the time and that means better, easier ways to create the idea of what you are designing in the first place. One can not work profitably in ten or even five year old software. This is a symptom of current life, implementation of the new happens a lot faster, and the ways of making things have to change with that. There is nothing wrong with updating software as long as it is an actual update and not just rent collecting. Solidworks is not rent collecting. The current is better than 2 yrs ago. Yes it is somewhat different. Yes it takes leaning. It is faster to use and it is a better product. Would you rather your competitors got the upgrades when they bought new or maybe you might think it’s a good idea that everyone gets the latest tool all at the same time?
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
Yeah I went with loser company Frontier, who have optical right to the wi-fi modem in my apt. The lowest speed they sell is 50 up and down with far faster available. I’ve got 200 up and down, $39.95/month. Interesting note, for an internet provider they are really lousy at websites. Service is first rate though.
Incitatus for Senate
@solitare:
Sigh. Look, you are obviously free to dislike and avoid Apple, but making objectively false statements doesn’t help your position. Support is measurable, and Apple’s is consistently better than average. Saying it is “notoriously the worst in the industry” is simply a lie.
J R in WV
@StringOnAStick:
Polarr editor, at https://www.polarr.co/editor/0
It evidently runs on windoze, MacOS, Ios, Android, Linux and Chrome. I haven’t used it on all those platforms, I don’t use Windoze nor Apple, and I don’t edit photos on Android or Chrome.
Another more complex and less automated photo platform is GNU Image Manipulation Program, which also runs on most operating systems. So far it doesn’t appear to handle RAW images.
J R in WV
@mad citizen:
Stay away from the AA weapons, that could destroy your political career!!!
;-)
Chetan Murthy
@solitare:
I can assure you with certainty that this is not the case, and without divulging anything I’m not supposed to. The intra-data-center networks of Google and the other big Internet services are wildly different from those of enterprise datacaenters — they have full bisectional bandwidth, for starters (read Google’s Jupiter network paper, and marvel that that stuff is already *obsolete* — that’s why they were OK with publishing it). The software is also wildly different — in a nutshell, look at the Google Chubby/GFS/Bigtable/Mapreduce/Spanner papers, and add to it this: nobody has even come *close* to reproducing this technology. Nobody. It’s >15yr old, and still not reproduced. Yes, there are those java clones, but they’re really shitty clones.
Specialized hardware matters at the scale and efficiency of these services. Which makes you wonder: “why didn’t IBM do this?” And the answer is: “because they got paid anyway, that’s why”. Another example of big companies refusing to innovate until they’re pushed to it, by competition. The same is true of Amazon AWS: the methods and software there has been known for dacades, and yet IBM and others didn’t bother to do anything about it. Only when AWS came along, did IBM even make a lackluster try.
None of this changes the position of the -public-, though: we have no great gain in keeping Amazon’s software, or Google’s, owned by a single monopoly player. Our best interest is served by having multiple players all competing, and all having this baseline of capability.
Break ’em up.
J R in WV
@Mike J:
I have stopped using Google for almost everything, and replaced it with DuckDuckGo, which uses as their main selling point “We Don’t Track You!”
I also block Facebook tracker, which appears on every web page I load even though I have never used Facebook at all, ever. What gives Zuckerburg the idea he is allowed to track everyone’s web use?
Obviously they can use that data to corrupt Democracy here and abroad. If I were in charge of cyber security for any group, I would block Facebook at every available level. From the routers to the backbone, sat uplinks and downlinks, everywhere, shut those corrupt treasonous lying bastards down.
J R in WV
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho:
I can’t use MS Office products, since I don’t run Windows of any flavor. The office-like products we use are the LibreOffice suite, which includes spreadsheet manipulation, word processing, a desktop-level database, etc.
These are open source products developed by corporations and volunteers, and they are free to download and install. They can import files from a variety of other software tools, with varying degrees of success, depending upon the complexity and options used in those source documents.
Major Major Major Major
@Citizen Alan: dead thread, but this is incorrect. Plenty of apps offer adult content. Tumblr had been looking for an excuse to dump adult content ever since Yahoo bought them. FOSTA/SESTA, the new panty-sniffing “anti-human-trafficking” laws, provided a convenient excuse. This is the same reason you can’t have “female-presenting nipples” on Facebook any more.
ProfDamatu
@solitare:
Oh, if only! For the last couple of years, I was able to set up both my personal and my work-provided OneDrive accounts to sync to my desktop – open files and move them using File Explorer, all that jazz. Awesome. Then, at the beginning of this academic year, the sync suddenly stopped working; drag and drop within File Explorer doesn’t work, can’t reliably open stuff anymore, etc., etc.
I called tech support, and their response was to (condescendingly, of course) start to walk me through how to access my OneDrive through the web client. I (as politely as I could muster) interrupted to say that, yes, I know how to do that, but said web interface is ungainly and difficult to use (hell, you can only read part of the file names!), and why does the sync-to-desktop no longer work? As near as I can tell, the answer is “something something Microsoft did something and we can’t fix it *shrug.*” We’re now halfway through the spring semester, and it’s still broken. Blech. :-P