Isn't the term "big tech" just successful companies?
So we ignore all the failures to get to that point and then declare them better?
Isn't this like asking why the Super Bowl champs are always good at football?
So we ignore all the failures to get to that point and then declare them better?
Isn't this like asking why the Super Bowl champs are always good at football?
Oracle and SAP and Infosys are big tech companies by any reasonable definition of big. You’ll be hard pressed to find technologists who would decscribe those companies as competent. And there are some amazing teams within those orgs that do stuff which is genuinely more impressive than hacking out protobufs from 1030am to 415pm with an hour long lunch, which is just to say that even within tech there’s a lot of PR/brand sentiment shaping opinions of people who should know better.
Uber is big tech, but still loses money hand over fist.
And even if we limit ourselves to the few companies with the most competent PR — the faangs — are they really so competent? Or are they just extracting value from near-monopoly market power?
Yeah I do wonder, if you somehow could, could those companies as they stand now just up and "do it again", could they?
Granted that's a complex question, but I suspect the answer isn't automatically yes... and likely very much a hard no.
But whose money are they losing? Nobody holds a gun to your head and requires you to buy shares in Uber.
I'll keep that in mind next time I read a thread about tech consulting shops or ISPs...
> and lose only the money of their investors and not unwilling third parties.
Well, there's also the employees, anyone invested in massively managed funds that include the private organization, etc. Who are all willing participants. But really only in the same sense that you, too, could get a graduate degree in a STEM field and immediately emigrate to another country.
ISPs are as they are as a result of government regulations. I don't know what the problems with "tech consulting shops" are supposed to be, but they sound like something people should stop doing business with until they go away.
> But really only in the same sense that you, too, could get a graduate degree in a STEM field and immediately emigrate to another country.
Except not in that sense at all, because emigrating to another country -- which may not be any better -- is a dramatic high-cost change to your entire life, whereas not investing in or working for a particular company is the default state that happens if you do nothing.
This sequence of thoughts expressed so closely together powerfully demonstrates how fundamentalism results in motivated reasoning that retards certain conclusions in one context and hyper-charges rationalization in the opposing context.
If you don't like market capture in the USA, you have the simple choice of simply stop doing business with the USA. Just like businesses always have the simple choice of simply stop doing business with abusive counterparties.
The point is that a private organizations often continue to exist despite incompetence because other (competent and highly profitable) organizations are not able to efficiently executing on the choice to end a business relationship.
The point is this: ending a business relationship can take as long, or even longer, than an individual executing on the choice to emigrate to a new region.
Ask any bank that has been continuously trying to move off of big iron since the 90s whether switching off of mainframes is, to use your words, a "dramatic high-cost change to your entire organization".
> ...leaving behind their friends and family and everything they've ever known...
Yes, and so is breaking a long-term business relationship...
My point is NOT that citizens should be expected to move between countries. My point is that your expectation about the efficiency with which firms can execute on their preferences is just as flawed as the expectation that labor can efficiently execute on its preferences (by e.g. moving between countries).
So, no, incompetent private organizations do not fail and go away. That baseless religious belief of market fundamentalists has no basis in reality.
There is a massive difference between something which is theoretically possible and something which is actually common.
And I would challenge you to even identify such a situation that didn't come about as a result of regulatory constraints or a government-granted monopoly.
> Ask any bank that has been continuously trying to move off of big iron since the 90s whether switching off of mainframes is, to use your words, a "dramatic high-cost change to your entire organization".
And yet even that isn't as difficult as emigrating, it just requires them to spend 2% of their revenues to migrate when the status quo is only costing them 1% of their revenues.
Meanwhile you've managed to choose an example which is a result of a government-granted monopoly and regulatory constraints. Under a sane copyright system a copyright that predates the 90s would have expired by now and enabled competition. And the reason they're still using mainframes unlike every other industry that has moved away from them is that they're subject to complex regulatory requirements that at the same time makes them change-averse and isolates their own industry from competition which allows them to absorb the inefficiency themselves.
Let the likes of Robinhood do half the things they want to do and see how many banks still using mainframes are left in ten years.
Nor are companies like IBM by any means the most egregious offenders. What they offer is expensive (some might say overpriced), but for the banks it's worth it over the alternative which is nonetheless actually available -- as proven by the fact that some banks don't use mainframes. Which is why even IBM has to keep coming up with better mainframes with faster processors and lower energy consumption and newer features instead of resting on their laurels.
> So, no, incompetent private organizations do not fail and go away. That baseless religious belief of market fundamentalists has no basis in reality.
The long list of companies that have actually failed due to incompetence and gone away would beg to differ.
I don't think I'd miss Oracle if they ceased to exist tomorrow, though. Aside from VirtualBox.
Unlike in government, where failure is often rewarded with an increased budget and a chance to try again next year with more money.
I don't buy into the idea that the failures don't count and we just recognize the success.
They are bureaucratic hellscapes internally that rival even the worst governmental orgs, with even less oversight.
We have nothing close to a free market as idealized by libertarians. And whether we should or not is an entirely separate argument.
A sufficiently well functioning government is necessary for a market to be well functioning and vice versa.
> Failures fail and go away, and what you’re left with are the successful organizations that know how to do things!
This isn't generally true and is dependent on what you define as a failure.
The private sector is exploiting, polluting and destroying natural resources all over the world even with regulations. Some of it are honest mistakes and ignorance, but much of it are "trade-offs".
The general and consistent quality of products and services in prosperous societies is enforced by regulations. Your food is (very) healthy, your houses are solid.
Similarly workers are being exploited all over the world. The only reason there are places where people are (close to) guaranteed to live decent, free lives is based on decades of activism, unions and governmental action.
There are also things where the government is just strictly more efficient than markets. Mostly projects and services which are very long-term oriented such as education, police, military, infrastructure, public transport, foundational research etc. They all have two things in common: They are based on collaboration rather than competition and they achieve long-term goals.
You see there is a balance here between the short-term gains of the competitive markets and the long-term stability of the collaborative governments and non-profits.
As with many things this can be simply observed from nature and evolution. Both competition and collaboration are important strategies of survival.
But "well functioning" in this context only means something like "efficiently prices externalities" and doesn't require the government to e.g. build housing projects, as opposed to just not passing zoning regulations that make the market price of housing unaffordable to begin with.
> The only reason there are places where people are (close to) guaranteed to live decent, free lives is based on decades of activism, unions and governmental action.
This is frequently claimed, but there is a long history of laws being passed requiring something right after the major players in that industry already agreed it was a good idea (and then started lobbying for it instead of against it because it would increase compliance costs for smaller competitors).
> Mostly projects and services which are very long-term oriented such as education, police, military, infrastructure, public transport, foundational research etc.
I'm inclined to think that these things would happen more often in the private sector if people weren't constantly kept on a treadmill of ever-increasing costs for housing, healthcare and education which require people to work long hours just to survive with no surplus.
If more of people's time was their own then they would experiment on their own without need for external funding, and have a surplus of wealth to pool and invest into those types of endeavors. It's what some billionaires do already, but can you imagine how far we would get if the resources of the middle class were allowed to go to that instead of just keeping ahead of artificial scarcity?
The getting there part is what many disagree on though. I certainly don't know how and I suspect most people don't really know either.