Literally anyone with a couple million dollars can put together an ASIC design team in a matter of months, design a functioning GLES2 GPU which gets acceptable performance, phone up a semiconductor manufacturer, and pay them about half the money to open a run for them. But even for that low bar, there is already an economic advantage to licensing somebody else's chip. When you start getting to higher feature levels and higher performance targets, the amount of real work required to design GPUs is considerably higher.
That said, if you have a few billion dollars to pour into an R&D effort, you can definitely open up a GPU shop, and no GPU mafia is going to be able to stop you.
Apple may win in the end, it's capital vs capital. A small startup trying to steal away that Apple contract from Imagination with a innovative incredible product though; They'd be properly crushed into dust for even dreaming about it.
I agree with all three of your points. Let me take a different tack to see if this makes my point more clear. Apple sued Samsung over rounded corners. The gall of them. As if anyone can own the concept of rounded corners.
Apple shouldn't be allowed to prevent other companies from building phones with rounded corner designs.
Imagination shouldn't be allowed to prevent other companies from building phones with GPU designs.
Clearly, both things happen. There are lots of phones now with rounded corners. Lots of phones with GPUs. But well placed litigation can hobble your nearest competitor or destroy a small one. The result is massive losses of productivity that could have enriched society.
All this thanks to the Capitalist idea that someone can own rounded corners or GPU designs simply because they have the most money. Capitalism rewards those with capital, not those who work hard and add value to society. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, but contributing to society is not a requirement and frequently does not occur.
Theoretically, a single super capitalist or small group of them could corner the market on everything and be rewarded for no other reason beyond ownership. Together, they could stop all progress. With companies like Apple sitting on $200,000,000,000 overseas, but failing to ship a new "pro" desktop since 4 years ago, this theoretical situation looks a lot more real every day.
From Imagination's perspective, rather than changing to different technology, Apple are trying to reimplement Imagination's technology, with ex-Imagination engineers, without paying them.
Whether Imagination are right about this or not, I don't think this is a clear cut case of patent bullying.
They also hold the patents on simulating physics on a GPU and a billion other patents.
Same goes for NVIDIA.
AMD and NVIDIA violate each other's patents all day long and many more they don't sue each other since that would be a legal balckhole for both companies.
But they will we very keen on sueing any new player.
Intel licenses a patent portfolio from NVIDIA currently for legal protections, and Samsung and Qualcomm license their GPU IP from AMD.
The economies of scale and necessary R&D investment needed to be competitive are the primary things preventing new upstarts from making an impact. This is because the industry has matured.
We usually call that Crony capitalism. Which is, not really capitalism.
And where do people "usually" call this "crony capitalism"? In fact, I tend to see this term only echoed around libertarian (the property kind, not the social kind) corners of the web.
It is also important to remember that natural monopolies can very easily form, and that the tyranny of property ownership isn't much better than the tyranny of the state granting various benefits to property owners. Proudhon in What is Property goes into this and Oscar Wilde talks about it in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Why is the crony vs 'not crony' distinction useful, and in what ways would a 'pure' capitalist society alleviate the problems caused by crony capitalism, including but not limited to the difficulty of acquiring sufficient capital to start a business or firm, dealing with anti-competitive behavior arising out of natural monopolies, the destitution and poverty caused by the extremely low cost of labour-power in certain parts of the world?
Please don't feel as though I'm attacking, I want to learn more about your ideas.
https://www.reddit.com/r/libertarianbestof/top/?sort=top&t=a...
Check out the sidebars for 10-20 more subreddits specifically dedicated to these topics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/is-big-tech-too-p...
Scare quotes should be required for that phrase. "Free" market.
Comically, be sure to let ARM know that that's how things work. Founded in 1990, they shouldn't exist today if what you're claiming is true, Intel should have wiped them out of existence 20 years ago.
And be sure to let nVidia know that's how it works, 3DFX (given their early lead) or ATI should have wiped them out of existence early on. Or perhaps any number of a dozen other early big corporate leaders in graphics technology.
And be sure to let AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Excite, et al. know that's how it works, as they should have wiped out Google.
And be sure to let Walmart, Target, Sears, JC Penney's, B&N, Waldenbooks, Borders and a hundred formerly major / soon to be bankrupt retailers know that's how it works, they all should have wiped out Amazon if your premise were true.
And be sure to let Microsoft know that's how it works, as they should have wiped out Redhat in ~1999.
And be sure to let MySpace & Friendster etc. know that's how it works, as given their extreme scale vs Facebook in 2004, they should have wiped them out.
And be sure to let Atari know that's how it works, as they should have wiped out Nintendo.
And be sure to go back in time and let Steve Jobs & Co know that's how it works, as given Apple's early size they should have wiped out Dell, Gateway, and dozens of other IBM compatible clone makers before they took over the PC market. Since that's how things work and all.
And be sure to let Netflix know that's how it works, so two dozen other massive global media & tech companies - from Comcast to Disney - know they should have wiped them out.
And be sure to let Oracle know that's how it works, they should have already wiped out Salesforce.com (and Workday, and and and and).
This list doesn't stop going.
AltaVista was a marketing stunt by Digital Equipment Corporation to show off how awesome the 64 bit Alpha processor was.
AltaVista was a great (I'd argue the best) search engine up until Google. More importantly, it wasn't a marketing stunt, it was the product of a research project and some really great, bright engineers.
AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[3] Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea,[4][5] along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the Web crawler and indexer, respectively. The name "AltaVista" was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. AltaVista publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.[6][7]
At launch, the service had two innovations that put it ahead of other search engines available at the time: it used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) that could cover many more webpages than were believed to exist at the time, and it had an efficient back-end search, running on advanced hardware.
I can justify considering it "marketing" though. They didn't consider it a way of making money, so from a business point of view it was basically a way of showing how good their research was and how powerful their hardware was. (Compare to, say, Deep Blue, or AlphaGo today.)
And to be fair, Google didn't start out knowing how they would make money either.
Now, from my memory, AltaVista and HotBot? were the key go to players outside of Yahoo. Google was a tiny fringe player at first, until, well of course we all know how that went. So AltaVista was definitely a key player at a very significant time in Internet history.
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2064954/where-are-th...
Turns out one of the many flaws in the op premise, is that you can invent a superior product, or provide a superior service, in an existing category and prosper accordingly. The iPod should have never existed otherwise, there were plenty of existing mp3 players.
It pertains to the traditional physical space as well as tech. Pizza companies as an example have been killing each other for a long time, new ones rise up routinely and displace weak competitors. If the op premise were correct, that'd be impossible. Pizza Hut & Domino's were founded a quarter century before Papa John's.
Survivor bias, and the blindness to survivor bias, does keep going.
>survivors prove the op's premise wrong
Nobody said it was impossible, except you. Recharacterizing a statement so you can knock it down is called a strawman fallacy. You may have heard of them.
You actually point out many examples that reinforce my point. Extremely poorly run companies like Yahoo, Sears, AOL, they're all still around. Microsoft has been poorly run for nearly two decades. It is still here. MS long since lost the server market to Linux, but that didn't stop them from throwing wrenches by proxy with SCO. MS failed miserably trying to approach the smartphone market, but that doesn't stop them from collecting licensing fees on every Android phone sold. Oracle too is trying aggressively to collect some of that Android lucre.
That's how the system works. It's winner take all. Pareto distributions everywhere. Quality products, services, and businesses are wiped out and destroyed by the rent seekers. Long after the rent seekers ceased to be productive contributors to the system, their bloated zombie corpses carry on, sucking the life out of anything new that was lucky enough to survive.
You seem pretty emphatic that it's impossible. Also, before you call Nvidia a rent seeker you might wish to look at the amount they spend on R&D and what they're doing in self-driving cars and deep learning.
But more realistically, we can list some successful outliers in a sea of tens of thousands of failed newcomers. It's very difficult indeed, but not impossible.
How many chip companies have seriously threatened Intel in 35 years? Not enough that it makes sense to invest in any of them but Intel. Picking ARM would have been pretty darn lucky.
nVidia is a positive outcome vs Intel. So is Apple (after all, they sell a couple hundred million units per year of compute devices with their own customized processors, which directly threatens Intel's prosperity, of course thanks again to ARM).
Or see: McDonalds vs the hundred new burger companies (Five Guys, Shake Shack et al) that have cropped up in the last 10-15 years.
Or: Anheuser Busch AmBev vs the thousands of independent brewers that have cropped up and taken an increasingly large slice of a formerly stagnant market (thanks to government regulations) with finite physical shelf space. Talk about a perfect example of how wrong the op premise is.
Tell GM & Ford not to worry about Tesla and the electric car revolution, because they can just kill off Tesla at any time (and yes, some things like that did occur, such as Tucker - thanks to government abuse in the market).
To simplify everything all patents should last 5 years max.
So nobody should ever be able to sue Amazon for infringement? Do you think other companies accountants would have trouble making profit vanish to avoid lawsuits?
For the ones that do, like nVidia or Google. The technologies are orders of magnitude more complex now than when they took over their competitors.
The op premise is trivially easy to prove wrong: it requires infallibility / perfect judgment on the part of competitors. That one thing alone is enough to end the argument put forth - and there are numerous other issues with it.
Their printing company, not their 3D printing company.
The same applies with NVidia. You can't start a GPU company because they are the GPU Mafia. They'll run you out of business before you even get a foothold with patent suits, licensing fees, etc, etc, etc.
That's why you have startup taxi companies literally breaking laws everywhere they go. Because the laws were, in part or entirely, set up to protect established interests.
Softbank then, is working inside this system, from the standpoint of the Capitalist... the man with all the money. They're buying up corner stores, because in the long run, it is guaranteed to pay them back. Even if poorly run, it will pay off for years because of the lack of competition. Capitalism is set up to favor the owners of capital.