Moving to AWS from running your own data centres is vastly more cost effective for most companies, you can build systems faster, you can scale them instantly, you can move resources between regions easily, you can focus on your company's core competencies. AWS creates massive value, that's why we use it.
I used to look up the phone numbers of restaurants in a phone book, but now I use Google. That doesn't mean they are equivalent to me and they provide the same value. Looking up a restaurant on Google Maps is quicker, I can do it from anywhere, I can look at reviews and I can see exactly where it is and get routing direction. The experience now is orders of magnitude more powerful and that creates huge value for customers and businesses.
Apple hardware is highly customised, and dramatically better than anything their customers have with better performance and advanced features like machine learning and secure authentication all implemented in custom hardware. That's been true on the phones for many years, and now with their in house designed desktop processors it's true for the Mac as well. Although the Mac has had unique custom hardware like the T1 and the 5K iMac video system for a while too. You cannot buy hardware like it anywhere else, at any price.
Strange, I bought a PC with 2x the specs at the same price as a maxed out Mac…
This has no value to me as their pricing is out of my budget and I don't like the idea of being locked into a proprietary ecosystem, which is of course down to everyone's personal preference, but judging by sales numbers, it looks like Apple's ecosystem has gotten some things really on point.
Yeah, you can get a PC with more ram, more storage and a bigger GPU.
I lived in San Francisco 2013-2018, before Uber I very rarely used taxis -- to/from the airport maybe. Having moved back to Denmark, I again very rarely use taxis.
But when I lived in the US, I used Uber many times each week. Sometimes to/from work.
But taxis in Denmark is easily 5x as expensive, and generally unavailable on-demand.
So now I was forced to buy a car, and call someone if I get a drink.
Point being: Uber certainly replaced taxis, but they also grew the market dramatically. The taxi industry is just a casualty, the pie Uber created is much bigger.
From the UX perspective, Uber combines payment processing and ride ordering in an app. Obviously an improvement over calling a Taxi dispatcher and telling them when/where to pick you up. But is that billions of dollars in value? Or is the majority of that value just being scooped up from previous incumbents?
The economics of the industry haven't changed dramatically - it's expensive to pay people to be your chauffeur.
> The economics of the industry haven't changed dramatically - it's expensive to pay people to be your chauffeur.
True, and if we allowed more free competition on the market Danish chauffeurs would be out of a job real quick. Replaced by immigrants.
But the size of the market did change. And that was my point :)
I think there is more people making a living driving Uber, than there was driving taxis [citation needed] ;)
You could argue that Danish chauffeurs would loose their jobs.. but part of me thinks: so what? We have low unemployment, why not have them work more productive jobs?
> Or is the majority of that value just being scooped up from previous incumbents?
So you think the majority of riders used taxis regularly before?
I certainly didn't, and I still don't -- but ride-sharing services I would use it available.
The point of even socialism is not to push existing solutions for everything and look at everything as a threat. The point is to improve people's lives, and letting people choose might be a right-wing method of accomplishing that, but you can't deny it's effectiveness.
Why aren't we dramatically improving public transportation? The fact that people chose not to use it means people judge their quality of life better with Uber than with public transportation. Use that, don't fight it!
I'll be honest: the few times I've used a Danish taxi, they've been very good.
In general it's like hiring black car service in the US.
Pick up time 8 minutes in Aarhus as of writing. If I go to Ikast it's 24 minutes.
And a 10min ride is 25 USD. A hour ride is about 200 USD.
Might try it if I ever need a taxis, but it's still a bit pricey.
(I have a friend who uses them regularly after we meet up.)
This hasn’t been true since the 90s. And the rest of your examples are similarly ignorant of the incredible pace of innovation coming from a lot of these companies. Google ads might not be changing the world, but their peripheral technology certainly is. AWS and Amazon’s core business as well.
Want to launch a board game aimed at left-handed nerds in a specific city? Before, you’d need a big media campaign that would also reach many right-handed non-nerds, wasting a lot of money. Now, you just need a few thousand $’s worth of targeted ads.
I think the way forward is somewhere in the middle, targeted ads with restrictions and opt-outs. Polarization isn't a path to progress.
As an aside, prostitution doesn't have to be the crime magnet it is today (in medieval Europe the Church ran brothels!) And while most drugs are unambiguously bad, some are considered safe enough to be traded openly and very profitably - caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and now marijuana.
To do a proper experiment, I suppose we'd need to compare otherwise identical individuals with differing education. Similarly, we could compare people whose only significant difference is the amount of search using Google, and assess their effects on GDP. Daunting to carry out these experiments, but possible in principle, no?
This is not necessarily true. The American economy is huge. Sections can grow slowly, sections can grow fast, all adding value while the bulk grows moderately.
> When the tech/telecom was truly creating new value (1995-2005), the productivity growth was at 27% that decade
4.7% growth accumulates to close to 60% over ten years. (EDIT: I misread the original comment.)
Sure, but I think OP meant productivity growth for the whole decade was 4.7%, not annually (though I'd like to see a source for that).
Fair enough. Real U.S. total factor productivity growth from 2009 to 2019 was 5.8%; from 1995 to 2005 12% [1].
I see your point but mostly disagree with it. The cost to advertise has dropped so while they have displaced some TV ads (still the largest) and most print ads, more people are able to advertise* so they are in a technical sense providing a different and better service to the market.
By analogy you say the same about cars, which “merely” displaced peoples’ “transportation spend” away from horses.
* I don’t think the growth of advertising has necessarily been particularly good; apart from the spying, people still only have 16 or so hours of consciousness per day so there is a zero sum and intrusive quality to ads. I’m just addressing your economic point.
Google/Facebook have displaced other ad formats, redirecting money to themselves. AWS have displaced IT technicians in other corporations, redirecting money to themselves. Apple is selling overpriced commodity hardware, redirecting money to themselves. Uber is displacing taxis, redirecting money to themselves.
In other words, it's barely above zero-sum game. And US productivity statistics are clear - the aforementioned corporations grew 500%-1000% in their profits and valuations since 2010. Meanwhile, the US productivity has grown by 4.7%. Had the SV tech been a clear net positive to the economy, the productivity growth would look different. When the tech/telecom was truly creating new value (1995-2005), the productivity growth was at 27% that decade.
(1) with notable exceptions: Microsoft really is creating value where one didn't exist before. So is Netflix, Amazon's venerable logistics and Tesla's drive to decrease battery costs