What is depressing about it?

Consolidation of a vibrant industry to just a handful of major corporations is a real loss, in my opinion. It's depressing in part because it makes avoiding those corporations much more difficult or impossible, because it makes the industry less vibrant and responsive, and because it locks a lot of talented people out.

It's also more than a little dystopian as the corporate stranglehold over all of us tightens just a bit more.

I don't think that's exactly what the article is stating. It'd be really hard for an upstart to build a formidable competitor to AWS for example, but that just means that the next breakthroughs will be less about infrastructure and more about applications (not apps, but different use cases). "Innovation, uh, finds a way."

Perhaps I was misled by the article analogizing to the auto industry. The auto industry is a great example of exactly what I fear is the future of of the software industry.

I'm not sure sure the auto analogy is very good, either.

Today there is the choice of a large variety of safe, efficient and performant car models from insanely low prices (once inflation is taken into account), and soon there will be a similar range of choice in EVs.

Generally speaking, quality is vastly higher than it has been in most lifetimes too - when did you last see a new car with rust on it, for example? (A few brands, notably Mercedes Benz, produce far worse products than they did in the 90s, but they are the exception).

If a wide choice of quality products is the future of the software industry, I'd welcome that, since it certainly is not the state of it today.

I am certainly not saying there aren't some advantages to an oligopoly, as the auto industry illustrates. But I do think the disadvantages exceed the advantages by a very large margin, even in the auto industry.

For instance, there are aspects of new cars that are ubiquitous and I find so objectionable that they prevent me from buying one, probably ever. If the market were more vibrant, I suspect that I'd have real options aside from "I can't have a car".

Also, oligopolies don't automatically mean that the products are improved. Usually, it's just the opposite.

The auto industry isn’t really an oligopoly though. Even if you restrict to “manufactured in the US” there are more options now than there were 30 years ago _because_ the three big manufactures were making trash, and competition did the job it was supposed to.

> there are more options now than there were 30 years ago

I suppose how true this is depends on what sorts of options you're looking for. The number of acceptable cars on the market now, according to my criteria, is lower than it has ever been.

This. And VC doesn’t help much, because as soon as you take the money you are in a race to become the next overpowered, uninspiring behemoth, only with less resources and a low chance of a real payoff.

Consolidation may not be inevitable, but it did happen on so many previous innovation waves (steam, electricity, telegraph, telephone, automobile, aviation beginnings were full of small, growing, competitive ideas and ventures too).

It comes with industrialisation and commodification and norms and regulation, so it's not all bad either as it consolidates/improves the general quality and availability.

(cue Dire Straits' Telegraph Road)

Well, if you want to take the traditionally Marxist position, all that competition results in duplicate work. During the golden age of the workstation, Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, HP, NeXT and IBM all made workstations with separate, incompatible operating systems and CPUs. In the end, all those vendors died, and that effort was entirely wasted.

Efficient? Maybe. But without competition of any kind, there's a possibility we'd still be using DOS lol. There can still be advancements of course under such a system, but I figure the progress would be a lot slower.

On the flip side, I can almost see part of your argument. The weather is a perfect example of your argument. The US government funds all the weather models out there, but due to lobbying, they're not allowed to actually have a website that tells us the weather. Instead we get like 5 crappy ad-infested sites that are terrible to use and just make a few people rich. It's insane.

>but due to lobbying, they're not allowed to actually have a website that tells us the weather.

Really? Because weather.gov has showing forecasts since 1995. You can view SF here: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=37.78&t...

There is some law that prevents the radar piece. I need to see if I can find that.

> It would have been much more efficient if the government had designated a single workstation vendor from the beginning, and denied CPU purchasing licenses to anyone who wanted to compete with them.

How would it be more efficient without a way to know if the end result is any good?

You have hit on one of the core problems of a Marxist-Leninist command economy.

As well as of an oligopoly-dominated economy.

The problem with comparing to car companies is that there are much tighter limits on how much accumulated power can corrupt a car company.

Sure, they got too big for their britches and created propaganda campaigns against pedestrians. They set up a status quo re: the environment that future generations will hate us for. But then their ability to be evil hit a plateau. The cancer that ought to have killed them dwindled, and for better or worse, we collectively said "this is fine". As the head of a car company, your paths to god-king-of-the-universe are significantly limited at the top end, and therefore so too is the extent to which your power turns you into an ineffective lump.

Information companies are not so limited. So the cancer that comes with being powerful is much more likely to be terminal. That is, there's nothing stopping Google from driving their user base away by just showing 100% ads and 0% content. They'll get worse and worse until we're all throwing money at anybody who stands a chance at putting them down.

Just look at Elon Musk, for whom efficacy appears to be secondary to simplify being the biggest threat to the status quo. That dynamic isn't going away: When he ceases being The One another anomaly will emerge.

So sure, it'll get worse before it gets better, but it's not going to be permanently worse. Even if we don't shoot them first, the bad guys will shoot themselves in the foot eventually.

> So sure, it'll get worse before it gets better, but it's not going to be permanently worse. Even if we don't shoot them first, the bad guys will shoot themselves in the foot eventually.

I used to think this way, but I have to admit the last decade or two has made me much more pessimistic about this.

There are just too many examples of oligopolies that have never stopped being terrible. I think the auto industry is one of them, and I suspect the software industry is likely to be another one.