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Comment by versteegen | Hacker News Reader

But what about the digital economy? It's interesting that the length of the supply chain for digital goods and knowledge work is nothing like physical goods. Google, Microsoft, and Apple are end to end, don't have to depend on any other software company if they don't want to (until LLMs, anyway, except Google).

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>> don't have to depend on any other software company if they don't want to.

I am rather sure that Google is heavily reliant on Microsoft and Apple to produce the operating systems used on devices that are in turn used to view Google's ads. And Microsoft is heavily reliant on hardware manufacturers (firmware is also software) to make the machines that Windows lives inside. And Apple is reliant upon a thousand and one companies that enable the innumerable mobile networks, which include many layers of non-apple software.

They are not reliant on them second-to-second. If anthropic tells these businesses they can't use anymore, or price hike, or ... then those businesses are kaput, right that second.

Plus you can bet your firstborn everything passes through the NSA first. So seems like a spectacularly bad idea, especially for .eu business.

There's no "right this second" way to kaput Google, not even if you're Microsoft.

What is a "digital economy"? There is only one economy as far as I know. Division of company inputs into software and non-software is arbitrary and has no merit as far as I can see.

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