The implicit promise is only partially true. Very rarely you can find a proven talent that will actually forego significant salary. Often time when that happens the person is close to founders and will have a significant role in shaping the startup and will get quasi-acquired too.
This promise may have been more true before 2010s where public companies were not paying as much in liquid cash and private companies were not valued so aggressively. Fact is most employees take the startup offer because they don't actually have a liquid offer that's super competitive at that moment, or they are just kind of bored and taking a break of the corporate job that does not give them too many responsibilities, i.e. they are compensated via the title, not just the promise of making bank.
In the sidebar of the Amazon website (which may vary by device/locale), I get Prime, Echo, Alexa, Fire TV/Tablets, Kindle, Audible listed before all other product categories. The special treatment so explicit, I didn't think anybody would even doubt it, but rather reply "duuuh, of course Amazon.com is for selling Amazon's own stuff".
I'm a follower of Cory Doctorow's anti-enshittification ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g). Amazon is well-known for giving preferential treatment to its own products, while squeezing other sellers to pay for placement (Amazon ads).
If you want something more data-driven, see "Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings" (DOI 10.1257/pandp.20231068), but this one is about everyday products. I'd expect Roombas to get more blatant promos like Kindle, Fire, and Ring products get. For example, if I search for "doorbell" on Amazon, the very first thing I get is a huge promo for Blink products (an Amazon company), four results from random brands nobody heard of, and then another huge promo for Ring (Amazon brand).
That's not substantiating your initial goalpost. You suggested Amazon wouldn't make Roombas better simply because they can preferentially sell their products. First, empirically, that is false given all other hardware devices Amazon makes have improved over time and not particularly gotten more expensive.
Second, preferentially selling it on one retailer does not suddenly make all the competition go away. Amazon is not a retail monopoly or anywhere close to it despite Lina Khan's bullshit paper that went through some mental gymnastics to create that myth. If anything, the synergy with the retail storefront can reduce overhead and decrease prices to the consumer.
The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half.
The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.
In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad.
In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies.
Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.?
Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding?
Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping.
I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.
Not sure I get the joke. MINIX is not building from scratch. It's a serious choice if one needs a microkernel. Hurd is more experimental but still not Amish.
IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere.
That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.
> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.
Agreed, like others, small startup I was with, we were acquired years ago and first advice from IBMers who'd been acquired was that IBM is like 1000 smaller companies.
> IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.
This. Employees in the various sub-companies and divisions usually don't even know who most of the executive leadership is outside their little world. There is no cohesive "IBM" anymore, and I don't think there has been for a very long time.
Funny that it keeps getting rediscovered that the statement from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs includes two variables: needs and ability both can and will be reward-hacked.
100% - they quit the much more lucrative WiFi business. The funny thing is the post, the likely the most interested party, who already spent $150+effort on a keyboard with TouchID admitted they are willing to spend $50. Literally the most excited customer who pays $150 is expecting a lower price than the keyboard. That simply shows the existence of such product is counterproductive to Apple's total revenue.
This promise may have been more true before 2010s where public companies were not paying as much in liquid cash and private companies were not valued so aggressively. Fact is most employees take the startup offer because they don't actually have a liquid offer that's super competitive at that moment, or they are just kind of bored and taking a break of the corporate job that does not give them too many responsibilities, i.e. they are compensated via the title, not just the promise of making bank.
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