Comment by akst
11 hours ago
If you’re assessing things entirely on a strategic basis makes total sense. It’s understandable why they are doing it but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s underrated or suggest there are no drawbacks.
Duplicating things without reason is wasteful. With a hobby project sure that’s your own time and is likely more an act of consumption and personal fulfilment. But these are national economic resources being redirected away from other things.
In software in a large codebase where there are coordination costs with reuse due to the organisation structure, there’s a strategic reason not to reuse, but it might highlight a limitation of the organisation structure, but that’s not something someone making the call to reuse code or not can do much about.
Likewise France really can’t do much about the state of the US and dependency is understandably seen as a risk.
I mean there are pros and cons to many things. What I mean by underrated is just that a lot of people say "oh duplication, how wasteful" and don't realize the benefits that may exist in redundancy and diffusion. I think the US would benefit right now if there was more "duplication" in the sense of greater diversity across many industries. More car makers, more film studios, more news organizations, more social media companies, more record labels. Not more stuff --- not more cars, more films, more news, more social media, more records --- but just the same stuff spread over a greater number of entities. The consolidation we've seen over the past several decades is a bad thing.
You know you CAN actually quantify how bad or good these things are in what respect and their second order effects. The trades off are pretty well understood. Increasing returns to scale are a thing, as are natural monopolies where consolidation is more efficient even with the headaches that comes with regulating a monopoly.
Car makers, entertainment companies, news organisations are very different kinds of industries to the ones we’re talking about here. They aren’t natural monopolies and don’t feature increasing to scale (at all output levels). In media, the reasons we’re seeing consolidation is due to entry barriers primarily with how IPs protections work. This is entirely unrelated.
Also you’re talking about this entirely from a consumers point of view. From economy wide point of view, duplication of a product will pull resources away from other industries that might be more profitable for a country. Which is bad for the same reason tariffs are bad. These are real costs that will affect quality of life and crowd out desirable economic activity.
Just circling back to this original article. This is arguably not one of those cases.
But redundancy and duplication purely on principle is dogmatic and shortsighted, and yes wasteful. We don’t have infinite resources in the world.