Comment by cmiles8
8 hours ago
“You told me these were the best engineers in the world!!”
“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”
(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).
Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
> To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.
All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.
And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.
Your story makes the point that the nonprofit app only worked under new government regulations and could not survive in the free market?
I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.
Americans when foreign goverment does literally anything: "no free market"
Americans when their government blasts their companies full of money for random unnecessary defense projects: "so free, much market, wow"
Enforcing laws, like requiring background checks, makes the market MORE free
The nonprofit app worked because the existing players didn't want to do required background checks on drivers and exited the market to make the local government look bad. When that tactic failed, they came back and used some of their VC billions to recapture the market by artificially lowering the price of their services. That's not at all "free market", that's buying your way to a monopoly (or more technically an oligopoly in this case)
It wasn't a free market, it was an anticompetitive market
A ride sharing app is ridiculously easy to create.
Most of the work is in network effects so you have a large pool of drivers willing to work below minimum wage and a large pool of riders interested in paying you a lot more than that.
Is US tech even good anymore? Do none of us not encounter the massive amount of shit from companies like Google, MSFT, Apple, Amazon, etc as users? Truly terrible bugs or user flows from engineers that clearly don't care while everyone is just collecting their own share of blood.
I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.
All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).
I sell/work as a consultant for m365 and azure and the services are definitely getting worse. AI translated garbage docs in which "plane" is translated as aeroplane (Flugzeug), Exchange as "Umtausch" (literal meaning of to exchange something) and so on. Obviously those are the ones I can remember because they were funny. There are also other errors that are not as obvious.
And don't get me started on slopilot being everywhere.
What has Rome ever done for us?
I see US (software) tech going the way of Boeing and Intel in the next decade. I’m not sure what their long term goals are, or if they even have any beyond chasing large/quick short term profits, but you can only enshittify your product and abuse your customers for so long before they start abandoning you.
I predict the cloud providers survive.
> I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.
Apple silicon has been pretty transformative for desktop/laptop-class chips.
Transformative sounds a bit exaggerated. It has a nice power consumption to compute power ratio, but it's not like order of magnitude above the rest.
A lot of the Apple Silicon magic is also due vertical integration with the OS IMHO.
I had CPUs since I've been alive, a faster one means very little to mean when the subsequent software is still trash.
It has been transformative for the insidious kind of lock-in that the post mentions.
No, US tech is driven by investors willing to risk allocating a ton of capital towards companies and products that have a good chance of succeeding.
Europe has been struggling and behind on tech and investments way before Trump. It’s policy and over regulation that prevents Europe from making any inroads
You absolutely can fight market forces. China did it for decades with their car industry. Chinese people were financially forced to buy inferior Chinese cars to support a domestic industry until it learned to compete in the global market. Very difficult to do this in a democracy, though.
Isn't that the exact description of the current U.S. car market?
In a way, yes, but there are some differences. The US market was never as heavily restricted as the Chinese market, with foreign competitors allowed to open up factories in the US to avoid tariffs. You can do that now in China, but until pretty recently you had to split ownership with a Chinese company to enter that market. Also US car brands have always had a significant export market (vs China only in the last few years), so our tariffs have always been more about jobs than industry development (though that makes no difference to the economic effect of the tariffs on consumers). Which is why foreign competitors were always free to avoid them so long as they employed Americans at the factory.
I am going to find this irony hilarious for eternity.
Cars are cheaper and better outside America, the so called car capital of the world.
Go to one of these SoCal car conventions, it’s amazing how all the car reviewers go wide eyed at the Chinese cars in display.
It's like how capitalists describing problems of socialism are just describing capitalism.
Literally in the front page of HN: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/16/patch_tuesday_secure_...
Better? It just needs to be cheaper I think.
The US tech power is a bit like the US political soft power, it's there because it's huge and has momentum but it's not like it'll be here forever, especially given the current trajectory
Libre Office is literally free and has never competed for significant market share in 30 years.
It has to be better
Have you ever heard someone open Word or any other microsoft product and say "wow this is such a good piece of software I'm so happy my corporation forces me to use it and I would pay to get more of that shit in my life" lol
Your "better" assumes that availability is not a problem.
The risk we need to mitigate is that some right wing doofus in the US gets triggered by a twitter reply and decides to block our use of all US software and services.
In that case, having libreoffice installed locally does not seem so bad.
This is the risk we are worrying about.
Good thing that US Tech is building the worst technology possible. Should make things a lot simpler
You’re getting downvoted because you touched on a sensitive spot with some folks, but you’re right.
If other countries want to stop their reliance on US tech then they need to build better tech. Your BlackBerry quote shows that playing out in reverse. A non-US company dominated the market, a US company built something better (the iPhone) and the non-US company imploded.
This is such an American take diametrically opposed to reality. You literally could not be more wrong. The correlation between "effort to fight market forces (i.e. protectionism" and "independence from US tech) is 1:1. It's China, then Korea, then the rest of the world which is all 100% dependent on US tech. China is independent entirely thanks to protectionism and banning right from the staft, Korea is inbetween thanks to the exact same.
The only thing that works is throwing up huge barriers against dumping. This is the norm for physical goods. US big tech, and really Silicon Valley, is based on dumping - burning VC cash to become a monopoly. This is not a hair better for a domestic industry than being flooded by physical goods that are cheap thanks to burning through (let's say Chinese) government cash. In the latter we love to call this "artificiallly cheap", though for some reason I've never heard this adjective used for US tech based on monopolizing by burning VC cash.
No, you have to build something that can work reasonably well, get rid of being fucking dependency slave in strategic areas and then try to catch up. Of course does not work for small countries
Only if you think that government's only purpose is to look pretty. Economies are planned. You can either plan them as governments, or let your oligarchs and foreign oligarchs plan them together ("market forces.") These only look the same when you allow oligarchs to determine your governments.
At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating.
If some guy in Canada builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.
edit: "Our ambition cannot stop there though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools, and other public institutions—not to mention private businesses—are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest."
This has always been the only answer, but it requires a relatively clean government. The government has to maintain ownership of these things, and cannot subcontract out the work.
You talk about "market forces" and you don't seem to understand them at all.
"Confidentiality", "Integrity", and "Availability" are a foundational concept of security (the CIA triad).
For non-US citizens "Integrity" and "Confidentiality" have been compromised for a long time, but these things have no day-to-day impact. They are only relevant as kompromat material once you become powerful and they want you to act in US interests.
What's new are serious, escalating threats and actions against "Availability". This is the most important pillar of security, and a whole different beast. Microsoft has blocked email accounts of international court of justice due to political pressure. Buffoons in US tech leadership such as Cloudflare CEO feel so emboldened that they openly threaten to cut off Italy. After TV performances by Musk, Thiel, Tim Apple, Zucky and Bezos in favor of trump there is no doubt they would cut off another country as form of pressure - and if it is only for a week.
In this week, our markets would be offline and nonfunctional. The market has a very high incentive to untangle from this mess of shitty bootlickers and impulsive convicted criminals.
It will take some time, but the market forces are clearly following the new incentives.
What surprises me here on HN that people who are seemingly US tech workers are quite ignorant to how it feels to be on the receiving end of this totally reckless, unprompted and idiotic behavior.
New?!
This isn't new. You just haven't been paying attention.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55615214
Or maybe it is fine when it happens to people you disagree with.
Your argument based on false equivalence bias might work with in a megachurch but not here.
Amazon dropping Parler, a shitty US-based right wing social network nobody outside the US ever heard of, is totally on the same level as US waging economic warfare against Europe and laying claim on sovereign countries like Canada and Greenland. /s
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