What I'm getting from this thread is that we're sort of fucked. The only way to stop Facebook and Google was to become them before they had a chance to. That way you'd presumably be more benevolent. Maybe that's true for Facebook, but it's still hard to imagine for Google.
I think the bigger problem is cross-generational power. YC itself is somewhat terrifying in this regard, but that's a different topic. In regards to Google and FB, even if we like Google now, we probably won't like the Google 60 years from now. But what is there to do?
Google stopped Microsoft by making Microsoft irrelevant, in the "Microsoft is Dead" sense: Nobody is afraid of them anymore. But people fear Google and FB. Imagine a Microsoft competitor to your startup vs a Google or FB competitor.
This could be a lack of imagination, but it's very difficult to imagine some new company making Google or FB irrelevant in the same way they made their predecessors irrelevant. Think of oil fields. At one point, before oil fields were monopolized, I've heard the ecosystem seemed pretty similar to Silicon Valley circa 2008. Everybody seemed to be able to get a slice of the action, and while it took determination and luck to get involved, it was possible.
Now the oil industry is on lockdown. Imagine asking "What are we doing about Exxon Mobil?" or Walmart. You can't do a damn thing, and there's no shame in admitting that.
As defeatist as it is, we may want to start thinking about ways of riding out the next 40 years in a productive fashion. It's more beneficial to say: Ok, Facebook, Google, and the closed internet are here to stay. Now what?
For example, if you're really set on doing something about it, one of the most effective things you could do is try to join the companies and shape them yourself.
Google was, as we all know, widely seen as benevolent when they were fresh on the scene. I don't know about you guys but I think their wish to "Do no evil" was genuine.
So what happened?
A competitor came long with less scruples. Facebook erupted on the scene very happily crossing the creepy line to wring every bit of data they could out of their users.
So Google now has to compete with this company that has far, far more data (advertiser captnip) than they do. And no one really seems to care - Facebook grows to 2 billion users. Google can either be outcompeted on this front, or they can race to compete, gather more and more data.
Google perhaps tried to stop Facebook by becoming them, but there's so much money in this industry that people are willing to do anything unethical to get past you to get it.
Same with the open web. Same with vendor lock-in. Etc.
Software is easy to copy and replace. There's little, if any, monopolization of software technology resources. Software doesn't require huge investment/over-head like oil industry. I don't think FB/Google/etc. provide much of anything (or of high value like oil) that is not already replaceable by million other alternatives. One of their key business model is selling ads spaces, but adblocks are also on the rise.
Every few days we have an article here in HN about a relatively big company, and people throw the classic comment that they don't understand how they need hundreds/thousands of programmers to do what they do, when the prototype of their website can be done by 2 people over a weekend. What you are doing is just a slightly more complex version of this, but the answer is still the same, scale.
Software is easier to copy and replace than many other things, but make no mistake: The amount of engineering done at the largest software companies is massive, and has gone way past the point of being easy to replicate. Let's talk someone smaller, like Twitter. Building a Twitter for 100 people is trivial. Scaling it to work well for serious volumes, building all the pieces that make it have actual revenue, and not be just a giant money pit, and all the effort required to build the userbase itself is just enormous. When we go past Twitter, and we think Facebook and Google, serious disruption of their core businesses is really, really hard, because every single user they have is an efficiency you don't.
In practice, every large software company today is running a whole lot of machine learning under the hood. Whether it's figuring out which ads to send you, just get you to stay on the site longer, or just have great fraud protection, the difference in data matters. Imagine your machine learning model is trying to sell ads. How much of a disadvantage are you in vs a company that is the user's default search engine, and has analytics hooks in the websites that your target person is on 75% of the time? What if they also have their text messages, know their friends, and their friends' purchases? You can have much better algorithms, but they have such an insane data advantage that you have to be orders of magnitude better to even compete with them!
So I'd definitely bet highly on those services, because they've spent years building moats. That doesn't mean they are unbeatable: We all remember the time when Microsoft and IBM looked unbeatable, and we all know what happened, but I don't think anyone without massive funding and a completely new, must have product has a prayer of entering their space and not be swallowed whole.
Here's an idea: A team of coders in a basement combine lots of AI discoveries done by others (Think merging orthogonal approaches like Numenta + Google Brain + Vicarious + etc). With it, they crack the neo-cortex algorithm (or a rough approximation). It learns outdoors (cameras, actuators), indoors (talking), on the internet, in libraries, on wikipedia, etc. It becomes actually useful. Not: "OK, google set an alarm.", but: "Hey Peter, I'm really stuck with this problem, can you find a solution on SO. Oh, and send flower to my Aunt, you know ... the one who likes pink".
If it was freely available I could see a massive migration of users abandoning google. Who needs google in such a context?
-- far fetched, yes. But it is a scenario where the breakthrough is algorithmic rather than Huge-data based. The learning can then happens slowly (2 years undercover from that basement?), and emerge as a powerful intelligence and company.
Yeah, maybe, but the coders able to "combine lots of AI discoveries done by others", as well as those who make those discoveries, are likely to work for Google/FB/MS/IBM/Apple/Amazon/etc already (or want to work there).
A group like OpenAI also has a good chance to make a breakthrough, but you can hardly call them "a team of coders in a basement".
It's unlikely that any a single company (even a large one) will have any significant advantage, because the research everyone does is highly public (everyone tries to publish asap). The research right now is at the stage where people are still looking which way to go, so as soon as someone stumbles upon a promising direction, everyone will jump on it (e.g. AlexNet success in 2012).
The same could have been said of Brin and Page. Why were they not working for yahoo improving their search algorithm? Some people will have the hunger and drive to disrupt the incumbent.
Exactly. You don't need all those people to make Twitter. You need all those people to make Twitter work at scale. Yes, technology does move easily, however if there's man-years of labour invested in making it work well at scale, it's suddenly a lot less movable.
I disagree. First is the immense capital investment these companies have in physical servers and data centers. They have economies of scale in delivering content over the internet. Second is mindshare and data lock-in. Users log onto Facebook because other users are there. There are no examples at that scale of user divestment from a platform (in lieu of a major technological or social blunder, ala MySpace or Friendster). Just being 'better' than Facebook means diddly squat. I think it is still theoretically possible to be a 'better' search engine than Google, but they have plenty of other moats and momentum to stave that off. Don't kid yourself, these are certainly monopolies .
Any new piece of tech can do it. Facebook's last existential threat was mobile, and they seemed to handle that well. But it doesn't mean they will handle the next, and the next, and the next well, too. Each step is a place they can stumble.
I think that this doesn't have to be true at all. Because of slow but inevitable commodification of the core technological concepts that make up their edge toward the rest of the market.
Open source search engines are still years behind what Google can do, but those technologies are much nimbler and easier to customize. Reactive paradigms, dockerization, open source tools for machine learning. Such tools might benefit the small players to allow building technology that might disrupt the big players.
Then again, many of those tools come from the big players which kind of defeats my point here...
Is the tendency towards mono/duo/trioploy a feature or a bug? You might say that increased concentration of proven tech/ideas allows them to be more efficient, which in the long run is better for consumers. But is efficiency a good in itself? On the other hand, the trade off is concentration of wealth and power, resistance to change, perhaps stagnation by favoring the momentum of the enterprise over innovation ... But without efficiency gains in farming we wouldn't have had, well, civilization or the industrial revolution. I guess what I'm getting at is this: as the internet transitions from the wildcatter era to a more stable, monopolized form, is that a good thing? Will it release thousands of entrepreneurs and 'laborers' to work on the next big thing? It doesn't feel like it. And when does the pursuit of progress or technology stop? I suppose that's an inherently Luddite stance to take, and I'm not even saying I agree, but it is an interesting question. Pretty much leads to requiring a 'meaning of life' or at least a 'meaning of civilization' philosophy to answer. Which I don't think we have. It was survival for a long time. Then expansion and conquering. And now ... ? What does a 'steady-state' earth and humanity look like? Is capitalism the best organizing principle for that era? All very good questions.
I think the bigger problem is cross-generational power. YC itself is somewhat terrifying in this regard, but that's a different topic. In regards to Google and FB, even if we like Google now, we probably won't like the Google 60 years from now. But what is there to do?
Google stopped Microsoft by making Microsoft irrelevant, in the "Microsoft is Dead" sense: Nobody is afraid of them anymore. But people fear Google and FB. Imagine a Microsoft competitor to your startup vs a Google or FB competitor.
This could be a lack of imagination, but it's very difficult to imagine some new company making Google or FB irrelevant in the same way they made their predecessors irrelevant. Think of oil fields. At one point, before oil fields were monopolized, I've heard the ecosystem seemed pretty similar to Silicon Valley circa 2008. Everybody seemed to be able to get a slice of the action, and while it took determination and luck to get involved, it was possible.
Now the oil industry is on lockdown. Imagine asking "What are we doing about Exxon Mobil?" or Walmart. You can't do a damn thing, and there's no shame in admitting that.
As defeatist as it is, we may want to start thinking about ways of riding out the next 40 years in a productive fashion. It's more beneficial to say: Ok, Facebook, Google, and the closed internet are here to stay. Now what?
For example, if you're really set on doing something about it, one of the most effective things you could do is try to join the companies and shape them yourself.