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Comment by simorley | Hacker News Reader

> However it is obvious why this is all happening. And that is Intel and Qualcomm inhibited growth and squeezed too much profit from the market.

It's not that intel and qualcomm have squeezed too much profit, it's that Apple, Google, Facebook, etc have too much profit. Apple and Google are worth $2 trillion. Facebook is worth more than $1 trillion. Intel and Qualcomm are worth $300 billion put together. These tech companies are big enough and monopolistic enough to own their entire hardware stack. It's like when Rockefeller and Standard Oil got so big that they "bought" the railroads that transported their oil.

Apple and Google each make more profit than Intel and Qualcomm's combined revenue.

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FAANG companies will primarily be differenated based on network or software, rarely commodity hardware. They don't need to go all the way to silicon if they can just tune the designs for their workloads. We're early on in that process, and I think the internt giants will progress up the stack into the metaverse, not down into the physical science of it.

Semiconductors are a capital intensive and brutal business, as evidenced by Intel's recent fall - they basically made one architectural mistake and that slip up cost them the lead on multi-threaded performance for probably 5-8 years, assuming they can get it back.

Separately, Rockefeller's coercion of the railroads was not something he did because he was big, it was something he did to become big. He would strong-arm his way into controlling or coercive positions at railroads, then cut off his competitor's ability to transport their product. When they were struggling, he would buy them up at distressed prices and turn the rails back on.

> FAANG companies will primarily be differenated based on network or software, rarely commodity hardware.

I know. I didn't say they were going to sell commodity chips. Just that they were big enough to own their own stack.

> Separately, Rockefeller's coercion of the railroads was not something he did because he was big, it was something he did to become big.

No. It was something an already large SO did to get bigger. If Standard Oil wasn't big, it could never coerce the railroads to begin with.

> When they were struggling, he would buy them up at distressed prices and turn the rails back on.

I know. But small insignificant standard oil didn't do this. It was big standard oil on its way to even bigger and better things.

Nice take, I infer them the same.

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