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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

By this logic, FAANG is best positioned to every tech innovation because they have the resources and know-how to pursue it.

I think it's a dangerous line of thinking as the power these company wields absolutely corrupts their governance. Sure they give us cool toys, and they have the marketing budget to make sure know it, but real talk: we need restrictions on their ability to dominate every area instead of cheerleading the horizontal economies of scale that erode our privacy, kneecap the next generation of startups, and consolidate power in ever smaller group of global corporate oligarchs.

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> FAANG is best positioned to every tech innovation because they have the resources and know-how to pursue it.

This isn't what I've seen. FAANG, and all large corporations, have many layers of bureaucracy that are required for approval of projects. "New" and "innovative" are "different" and "not well understood" by definition. As the bureaucracy get crusty, and more risk adverse, the ability to get these "unknowns" approves becomes harder and harder. Instead, you see buyouts of small companies, who didn't have that layer of bureaucracy to dig through, as the larger source of innovation. Going forward in time, like Intel, these small and innovative acquisitions get integrated and destroyed by that overwhelming bureaucracy, before they can even be fruitful.

This, it is much cheaper to sit on hands and wait for the 1/20 startups to succeed and then just buy them.

Unfortunately this will work indefinitely until governments realize that it is not good for the health of the economy.

Governments do the same thing. They can't do much by themselves, so they issue RFPs, vendors bid then do for them. Many of these vendors don't make it (1/20? no idea). Is that also bad for the economy?

Our democratic Governments are ultimately held accountable by voters and not their fiduciary obligation to maximize profit for shareholders. There is a more humanist element to governments.

They also have the war-chest to acquire any startup that does the hard work of tech R&D.

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