Comment by ianai
7 years ago
The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”
7 years ago
The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322548 and marked it off-topic.
Discussing economics is off topic in a business merger? Its completely on topic. Economics is literally the study of scarce resource allocation. In the US, that’s everything from personal choice, business operations, through to global considerations.
To quote the dictionary “a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services”
It’s my understanding that HN is for technical discussions and business discussions. That’s exactly what my comment discussed. Further, that book by Galbraith is widely considered the gold standard for the Great Depression.
TLDR: if you want hacker news to be taken seriously as a place to discuss business and tech then my comment is appropriate in a merger discussion.
It's off topic because generic ideological discussions are always the same. When something is that predictable, it adds no new information, cannot gratify curiosity, and therefore doesn't meet the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I feel you're right, which is why I'm surprised by the seemingly negative response to this news, and the overwhelmingly positive response from GitHub+Microsoft.
Some of the same conflicts of interest exist in both modern cases, notwithstanding, both have opposite contribution histories.
Am I missing something?
I got the impression that nobody at all on HN was happy about the GitHub thing, FWIW.
I'm sorry, I'm in the PNW. I think I just got caught in my own damn bubble.
4 replies →
Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft is at least a software company.
IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat.
Competing with AWS and Microsoft is pretty crazy and does not make sense to me. RedHat’s value is in its software, not its cloud delivery.
And, frankly, I depend a little more on centos/fedora than I do Github.
> Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft is at least a software company.
> IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat.
Maybe the complementariness of this could be good?
(Yes, Microsoft is a software company, but they produce a particular type of software which is why many people weren't thrilled about their acquisition of Github.)
It may be strictly wrong to call them a "cloud" provider, but they've bet big on on-premise cloud-like systems, which carries a lot of potential for future growth.
If you want enterpricey Kubernetes, scratching those auditing and authorization itches it carries, Openshift is probably on your short list.
They've been competing with cloud providers for while already. Bluemix may not be very popular, but it seems to be growing https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/
I wouldn't call the GitHub+Microsoft acquisition response "overwhelmingly positive".
I agree, plenty of criticism and skepticism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286
Concentration of power isn’t always socially optimal. It’s probably never optimal.
There are periods of concentration and entrepreneurship. Part of the market maturity lifecycle. As a market gets more well established, competitors become less differentiated and start competing on cost which leads to consolidation. This creates openings for upstarts to disrupt or open new markets.
... and yet there is no shortage of examples of ownership being consistently more concentrated over time. Are we are right around the corner from seeing "upstarts" in the television, telecoms, and food manufacturing industries?
Seriously? TV has been totally disrupted by streaming services. Music too. Some industries simply morph into utilities and get stuck in that space forever. Telecom will land there eventually.
2 replies →
Yes. Television is in the midst of one now.