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Comment by shadowtree | Hacker News Reader

Because bigger teams can accomplish bigger things.

HN has this understandable infatuation with startup mode, but running a truly global product line of anything with a large customer base is simply a lot of work.

Apple can't be run with 5 people, it also cannot be attacked by a 5 people startup. Same for Microsoft, AWS, ... broad massively multi-product companies are very hard to take on if they have their general shit together. Ask Slack how it went against MSFT Teams, a clearly INFERIOR product. Microsoft out-scaled Slack, simple as that.

Sustained innovation of a big company is a formidable moat against disruption. Look at big pharma, these companies have been around for 120+ years! Merck was founded in 1891 (from a root company founded in 1668!) and is still a 50bn revenue behemoth. And yes, modern biopharma is big tech.

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Many of Apple's products could be attacked by smaller companies, if it weren't for their anti-competitive practices. For example, AirPods get exclusive and superior APIs on iPhones - it doesn't matter if you make a better or cheaper AirPod competitor because you are stuck with clunky Bluetooth pairing. No non-Safari web renderers. Can't backup or transfer files to your iPhone without another Apple product. iMessage, the Music app. 30% fees and no sideloading. The list goes on and on.

To think that Microsoft almost got broken up because of bundling IE with Windows.

Anti-competitive practices is when the government prevents other companies to join the market. That is not the case here. Do you really expect Apple to make life easier for their competitors? You're free to use Samsung, Galaxy Buds, Whatsapp and Spotify if you don't like Apple's products.

> Do you really expect Apple to make life easier for their competitors?

If Google Chrome was using 100% internet bandwidth for downloading Google.com, but 60% for downloading Bing.com, would that be just "not making life easier for competitors", or maybe something more?

Apple's behaviors on iOS are this kind of things. Perfect integration with other Apple products via private APIs, basic limited APIs for others

Not something more, IMO. You are free to download any other browser, there are plenty to choose from.

Start-ups routinely massively underestimate the number of people needed for tasks though. I saw a start-up that thought they could build a Siri competitor with five FTEs. That is just so far off from any reality.

I'm not sure you really understand the technical complexity that goes into Apple's most basic products. The top to bottom in-house software stack is one thing, but that's the tip of the iceberg. Their manufacturing is best-in-class. They can make better products than you can, at price points that you can only dream of. You could pour tens of billions into a competitor and not even come close. They are so politically powerful that Tim Cook telling Terry Gou that they're moving their latest production out of China pushed the country out of zero covid overnight.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/letter-from-top-apple-supplier-...

It depends. With some of those items, it would absolutely be possible.

Hence Apples large number of lawyers and legal analysts ensuring they can hold their phone/store monopoly thereby bloating the number of staff they have.

You are literally re-describing what I posted. Apple, MSFT, etc. out-scale you an all fronts - legal, go-to-market, marketing, bundling, pricing,... Their scale is their moat. More lawyers than you have coders, and that's that.

I very much agree with this, being quite familiar with large companies.

What's interesting is that like with most scaling problems, you don't realize that scaling a company actually means scaling people, and that the numbers can actually be very high, until you actually experience it.

In my case, the understanding came quite late, but completely transformed the way I saw my work, my company, and my management. Basically, at some point, you will need a boatload of people - the optimal number and what too many means being another question!

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