Is it me, or is traditional news always attacking tech?
Why don't I see the same fervor targeted at the likes of Walmart, who dominates traditional retail?
Or Comcast/AT&T owning our internet infrastructure, continuing to acquire other massive companies? They have massive media holdings now.
Or CVS acquiring Aetna?
> Why don't I see the same fervor targeted at the likes of Walmart, who dominates traditional retail?
The media spent the entire 1990s and early 2000s very aggressively attacking Walmart at every turn. They were the destroyers of all small towns; they were the anti-labor bully; they were the crusher of mom & pop shops everywhere. Some of it was accurate, some of it was typical media propaganda appealing to their audience. Walmart is still basically barred from opening stores in New York and San Francisco because of the Walmart-as-villain press job from that time.
The way this works is, now it's Amazon's turn to be the villain because they're the new giant on the block. Fair or not, it always works that way (see Microsoft today, vs Google as the new 1990s-Microsoft-style villain getting endless amounts of negative press; tomorrow some company will be the new villain that replaces Google in the media, and Google will be the old, less-feared company in the style of Microsoft now; and on it goes). No doubt Walmart is relishing that aspect of having to compete with them.
Youre not wrong that there is a lot of focus on tech specifically with regards to progressive anti-trust policy. But it doesnt have to be one or the other. Our definitions of what a monopoly is, like the article states, has to do with consumer pricing rather than if a firm is a monopoly or not.
Personally, I think amazon, if properly divided, could be dozens of healthy, competitive businesses. Maybe if there were less monolithic, open standards would be more important to facilitate cooperation and integration. In some ways this applies to the brick and mortar / ISP companies too.
Hey,
That's intentional. My wife and I worked on this together over a couple of weekends hence the use of I/we. We built this so that we can work on a little project together and not for recognition. We're pretty private and we'd be quite happy if no one knew our names but I'm sure that with a few google searches, you'd be able to find out who we are.
Since we don't collect any data apart from page views/loads, we think that's fair but I'd love to hear your thoughts if you disagree.
Thanks
"GATES: Before I sit down to code something, most of the instructions have already run through my head. It’s not all laid out perfectly, and I do find myself making changes, but all the good ideas have occurred to me before I actually write the program. And if there is a bug in the thing, I feel pretty bad, because if there’s one bug, it says your mental simulation is imperfect. And once your mental simulation is imperfect, there might be thousands of bugs in the program. I really hate it when I watch some people program and I don’t see them thinking."
"INTERVIEWER: Does accumulating experience through the years necessarily make programming easier?
GATES: No. I think after the first three or four years, it’s pretty cast in concrete whether you’re a good programmer or not. ... There’s no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight. I can talk to somebody about a program that he’s written and know right away whether he’s really a good programmer. If he’s really good, he’ll have everything at the tip of his tongue. ... To this day, I can go to the blackboard and write out huge slabs of source code from the Microsoft BASIC that I wrote ten years ago."
Think he still holds this sentiment today about what makes a good programmer?
This is shortsighted because the employee may already be sitting on an offer/is willing to leave. If a good employee asks management for a raise outside of the annual performance review cadence, and is rejected with "Ask me after performance review", management shouldn't be surprised to receive the employee's 2 week notice.
The point is, people are usually not proactive about money. Usually they don't ask for more money if there's a schedule for possibly getting more.
In industry where employees are expensive and they switch jobs roughly every two years anyways it makes total sense. You get to keep employee for another six months for same salary on he may think that it's what he deserves.
Key employees who ask for more, get more. Non-key emploees get "wait for it" because nobody cares if they leave. And some key employees don't ask.
I agree that exploiting your employees it's short sighted but for most businesses short sighted works good enough.
