Certainly they have scale advantages, but there’s also diseconomies of scale that can work against them.

Rather the chilling effect - the firms themselves (may be) slow to perceive the next iteration of consumer needs.

Startups on the other hand figure them out - and build a product.

The big fish/spiders, with their larger webs, sense the new upstarts and THEN build those features - and then go back to whatever it was that they were doing. The cycle then repeats.

Never mind that MS had pulled something similar vs Novell some years prior, by bundling a client with Windows and then marketing their Exchange server as a drop in replacement for Novell's Netware. Just set up a NT box in the server room, configure the PCs, and phase out Netware.

when it's your startup it's 100%. But they don't need to score perfectly always. They can raise your costs by 100 fold if they want, and if they fail, so what, they try another thing. Time and time again and still have tens of billions in bank. The startup has 4-5 months of salaries, if lucky.

Anyway I met the lawyer of the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, with one question: how can I prevent the tech giants from cloning my open source software, while the indie shops can? He said AGPL. That’s the poison pill you need for those big guys.

“You just watch, we are gonna copy your open source software, roll it out it to our 1 billion users and release all the source code to everyone so they can build on top of it.. oh wait.”

Yes! Do that! It will help everyone

You see... an economic system of collaboration instead of competition eliminates a lot of these issues. The best architecture and code rises to the top instead of being killed off, and the profit motive isn't what drives progress.

1) We will give you a large sum of money for your startup. 2) we will pay our workers so much they won’t want to do a startup.

2) is fine .. unless there are secret no-poach agreements in place.

But ok, let's just create this fantastical narrative that "paying workers too little" and "paying people too much" cannot possibly apply at the same time to different segments of the population.

Hell, let's even use the loaded phrase "evil capitalists", a great term if what we're looking for is to deftly avoid any real criticism of capitalism.

I guess the current system isn't so bad.

...and inequality is skyrocketing.

> technological progress is advancing at a rate never before seen in human history.

Compared to the growth between 1900 and 1950, we should have teleportation now.

I'm not making a joke: life-changing progress keeps slowing down. E.g. refrigerators, washing machines, cars, airplanes, x-rays VS internet and smartphones.

> I guess the current system isn't so bad.

Compared to what? That's a false dichotomy fallacy.

I think over the last 20-30 years, the useful and helpful-to-society technological progress as a fraction of the technological industry is fairly low. Most of Silicon valley is figuring out how to extract as much ad value from consumers as possible; except for the single percentage renewable energy fraction, most of the advancements in the energy industry is a net negative for humans; medicine is stagnant because of the increase in complexity and economics; and the list goes on...