A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
2018-03-17–2019-09-07
finished
certainty: highly likely
importance: 5
Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. A classic example is the commodification of PC hardware by the Microsoft OS monopoly, to the detriment of IBM & benefit of MS.
This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS (Google): they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
Ex-MS product manager Joel Spolsky’s 20021 “Strategy Letter V: The Economics of Open Source” (Slashdot; HN) discusses a pattern he saw in technology companies, software, and Microsoft in particular. While he does not cite, it’s likely he was influenced by Carl Shapiro & Google economist Hal Varian’s best-selling 1999 technology economics book, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, which discusses the idea extensively. Definition: make yourself a monopoly by growing the markets around you. I excerpt the definition & examples below (emphasis in original, most links added):
Every product in the marketplace has substitutes and complements. A substitute is another product you might buy if the first product is too expensive. Chicken is a substitute for beef. If you’re a chicken farmer and the price of beef goes up, the people will want more chicken, and you will sell more.
A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants. In a small town, when the local five star restaurant has a two-for-one Valentine’s day special, the local babysitters double their rates. (Actually, the nine-year-olds get roped into early service.)
All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.
…In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the “commodity price”—the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So:
Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.
If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.
When IBM designed the PC architecture, they used off-the-shelf parts instead of custom parts, and they carefully documented the interfaces between the parts in the (revolutionary) IBM-PC Technical Reference Manual2. Why? So that other manufacturers could join the party. As long as you match the interface, you can be used in PCs. IBM’s goal was to commoditize the add-in market, which is a complement of the PC market, and they did this quite successfully. Within a short time scrillions of companies sprung up offering memory cards, hard drives, graphics cards, printers, etc. Cheap add-ins meant more demand for PCs.
When IBM licensed the operating system PC-DOS from Microsoft, Microsoft was very careful not to sell an exclusive license. This made it possible for Microsoft to license the same thing to Compaq and the other hundreds of OEMs who had legally cloned the IBM PC using IBM’s own documentation. Microsoft’s goal was to commoditize the PC market. Very soon the PC itself was basically a commodity, with ever decreasing prices, consistently increasing power, and fierce margins that make it extremely hard to make a profit. The low prices, of course, increase demand. Increased demand for PCs meant increased demand for their complement, MS-DOS. All else being equal, the greater the demand for a product, the more money it makes for you. And that’s why Bill Gates can buy Sweden and you can’t.
“Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements”
Spolsky provides 8 examples (IBM commoditizing the add-on manufacturers, MS commoditizing IBM+PC manufacturers, IBM/
Understanding this strategy actually goes a long, long way in explaining why many commercial companies are making big contributions to open source. Let’s go over these.
Headline: IBM Spends Millions to Develop Open Source Software.
Myth: They’re doing this because Lou Gerstner read the GNU Manifesto and decided he doesn’t actually like capitalism.
Reality: They’re doing this because IBM is becoming an IT consulting company. IT consulting is a complement of enterprise software. Thus IBM needs to commoditize enterprise software, and the best way to do this is by supporting open source. Lo and behold, their consulting division is winning big with this strategy. …
Headline: Netscape Open Sources Their Web Browser.
Myth: They’re doing this to get free source code contributions from people in cybercafes in New Zealand.
Reality: They’re doing this to commoditize the web browser. This has been Netscape’s strategy from day one. Have a look at the very first Netscape press release: the browser is “freeware”. Netscape gave away the browser so they could make money on servers. Browsers and servers are classic complements. The cheaper the browsers, the more servers you sell. This was never as true as it was in October 1994. …
Headline: Transmeta Hires Linus, Pays Him To Hack on Linux.
Myth: They just did it to get publicity. Would you have heard of Transmeta otherwise?
Reality: Transmeta is a CPU company. The natural complement of a CPU is an operating system. Transmeta wants OSs to be a commodity.
Myth: Sun and HP are supporting free software because they like Bazaars, not Cathedrals.
Reality: Sun and HP are hardware companies. They make boxen. In order to make money on the desktop, they need for windowing systems, which are a complement of desktop computers, to be a commodity. Why don’t they take the money they’re paying Ximian and use it to develop a proprietary windowing system? They tried this (Sun had NeWS and HP had New Wave), but these are really hardware companies at heart with pretty crude software skills, and they need windowing systems to be a cheap commodity, not a proprietary advantage which they have to pay for. So they hired the nice guys at Ximian to do this for the same reason that Sun bought Star Office and open sourced it: to commoditize software and make more money on hardware.
Headline: Sun Develops Java; New “Bytecode” System Means Write Once, Run Anywhere [WORA]. [See also Microsoft’s .NET Framework.]
The bytecode idea is not new—programmers have always tried to make their code run on as many machines as possible. (That’s how you commoditize your complement). For years Microsoft had its own p-code compiler and portable windowing layer which let Excel run on Mac, Windows, and OS/
2 , and on Motorola, Intel, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC chips. Quark [QuarkXPress?] has a layer which runs Macintosh code on Windows. The C programming language is best described as a hardware-independent assembler language. It’s not a new idea to software developers.If you can run your software anywhere, that makes hardware more of a commodity. As hardware prices go down, the market expands, driving more demand for software (and leaving customers with extra money to spend on software which can now be more expensive.)
Sun’s enthusiasm for WORA is, um, strange, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last thing they want to do. Oooooooooooooooooooooops! Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you’re going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley.3
“Open Source as a Strategic Weapon”
In Eric S. Raymond’s famous 1999 The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he includes a section, “Open Source as a Strategic Weapon” on commercial motivations for sponsorship of FLOSS along the lines of Spolsky’s examples, listing Apache, the X window system, and Netscape Mozilla as examples of strategic uses of FLOSS which look like “commoditize your complement” examples:
Cost-sharing as a competitive weapon
Earlier, we considered Apache as an example of better and cheaper infrastructure development through cost-sharing in an open-source project. For software and systems vendors competing against Microsoft and its IIS web server, the Apache project is also a competitive weapon. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for any other single web server vendor to completely offset the advantages of Microsoft’s huge war chest and desktop-monopoly market power. But Apache enables each corporate participant in the project to offer a webserver that is both technically superior to IIS and reassures customers with a majority market share—at far lower cost. This improves the market position and cost of production for value-added electronic-commerce products (like IBM’s WebSphere).
…Resetting the competition
When the development of the open-source X Window System was funded by DEC in the 1980s, their explicit goal was to “reset the competition”. At the time there were several competing alternative graphics environments for Unix in play, notably including Sun Microsystems’s NeWS system. DEC strategists believed (probably correctly) that if Sun were able to establish a proprietary graphics standard it would get a lock on the booming Unix-workstation market. By funding X and lending it engineers, and by allying with many smaller vendors to establish X as a de-facto standard, DEC was able to neutralize advantages held by Sun and other competitors with more in-house expertise in graphics. This moved the focus of competition in the workstation market towards hardware, where DEC was historically strong.
Preventing a choke hold
In explaining the loss-leader/
market-positioner business model above, I described how Netscape’s open-sourcing of the Mozilla browser was a (successful) maneuver aimed at preventing Microsoft from effectively locking up HTML markup and the HTTP protocol
Generalizing
A way I would express it as: Any product is the joint outcome of a large number of individual components, each of which layers is necessary but not sufficient to the final valuable use of the entire stack put together; a smartphone is not much good without a power-efficient sensitive radio, but the radio is not much good without a good OS on top of it, and a good OS is not much good either without great apps like web browsers (and is a web browser all that useful if there aren’t useful websites to use in it, and where are the languages & compilers for all this coming from anyway…?). Many products are formed by a stack of two-sided markets.
The end product of a Symbian, iOS, or Android smartphone is without a doubt fantastically valuable to the user, but what is the fair division of the revenue among the countless people, technologies, manufacturers who created each of the many critically-important layers in the full tech stack? Certainly contemporary intellectual property law (eg “software patents”) does not provide a socially-efficient distribution like the Shapley value to all the participants! There are constraints in that the final product cannot cost more than the value to the user (otherwise consumers simply wouldn’t buy it, and if the consumer surplus isn’t at least considerably above zero, no one would bother to learn about it) and the companies in the commoditized layers can’t be forced down to below marginal costs (otherwise they would go bankrupt & exit the market), but these are weak, and do not give any good hints as to who will capture the majority of the value: the chip fab manufacturers? the chip designers? the device manufacturers? the OS developers? the userland application developers? the ISPs? the website owners?
Vertical integration can be an effective way of resolving the intractable market dispute with top-down dictatorships, but can require lax anti-monopoly regulations, high capital investment, massive corporation overextension & empire-building, and risks being outcompeted at every level by nimbler competitors; this makes it difficult for any up-and-coming company to implement, and often ineffective. Commoditizing the complements, in contrast, permits a company to remain (relatively) small & lean, can often be accomplished with small strategic investments in releasing intellectual property or other investments, can be done incrementally focusing on specific layers without the “Big Bang” orientation of vertical integration and permitting “defeat in detail”, retains the general facade of competition, and ensures the extreme competition remains confined to other layers of the stack where the product can benefit from the cost reductions in the complement but is not itself at any risk.
In practice, the division winds up being due to power plays and market dynamics, and who can most effectively erect a moat while sabotaging competitors, exploiting tactics like lawsuits & software patent trolling, proprietary APIs, cross-business subsidies, kickbacks, DRM, deliberate incompatibility or “embrace and extend”, FUD, operating at a loss indefinitely, etc. (“There’s An App For That” is why you buy an iPhone—but it’s Apple with the $930 billion market cap & not the app developers.)
Done correctly, this is effective at perpetuating incumbents’ long-term control of markets & justifies their enormous valuations—by definition, the competitors elsewhere in the stack, who might develop a chokepoint, are too numerous, fragmented, and low-margin to invest substantially into threatening R&D4 or long-term strategic initiatives, and any upstart startups can be relatively easily bought out or suppressed (eg Instagram or WhatsApp). Nor does this require convoluted explanations like “they are pretending to not be monopolists” or fully general unfalsifiable claims like “it’s good PR” for why big companies like Google steadily fund so many apparently oddball projects like new foreign language fonts (or free TrueType fonts & TrueType itself) or open source TCP/
Another way that I like to express that is “create a desert of profitability around you”. I once had a strategy professor define the Google business model somewhat like that, where “Google tries to make every other business around it free or irrelevant”…A desert of profitability shifts consumers to you, and keeps competitors away.
Examples
A list of examples I think reflect this dynamic to some extent:
hardware vs software: IBM’s 1956 consent decree settling a 1952 antitrust lawsuit: IBM was required to sell as well as lease its devices; more importantly, its business services arm was spun off and IBM had to license software/
patents/ manuals/ training to competitors. Previously, IBM (like many other hardware manufacturers) included all necessary software with its hardware for ‘free’, particularly for the OS/
360 , strangling any independent software market; the decree and the eventual “unbundling” is credited with sparking a vibrant (and highly profitable) market for IBM mainframe software. (It is also credited with putting the fear of God into IBM & protecting smaller companies like Microsoft; in an ironic repetition, Microsoft’s own antitrust travails in the 1990s are credited for causing it to back off its classic ruthless tactics and enable Google’s own rise to dominance5.)IBM’s patent-free release of the PowerPC ISA in 2019 might be another example.
banks vs merchants: credit card companies/
small businesses: interchange fees in particular (part of why the credit card industry is one of the highest-profit margin ones after academic publishing—itself a highly suspicious example). Amazon vs PayPal is a big example. integrated vs open architectures: Lisp machines vs x86/
SPARC/ Sun apps vs OSes: Netscape vs Windows (in Robert Metcalfe’s infamous expression, cross-platform web browsers & the Internet would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”); MS’s initial response was to… license IE free for all users, not just noncommercial users like Netscape, killing a major revenue stream for Netscape early on6
FLOSS: Red Hat, Google etc
- editors vs IDEs: XEmacs represented an early example of a company trying to improve a FLOSS version of a genre of software previously typically sold commercially (text editors) in order to support sales of more niche tooling (their C++ IDE)
- IDEs vs software devs: GNU and compiler/
interpreter companies: GCC; commercial C++ implementations would themselves be cannibalized by GCC, and IDEs by other FLOSS IDEs (apropos of IBM and Java, Eclipse) - programming language ecosystems vs users: in programming communities (especially functional languages like Haskell/
OCaml/ Scala/ Clojure), it is common for a lot of work on compilers/ libraries/ tutorials/ books to be sponsored by web development or consultancies, serving both as advertisements for their capabilities and also removing pain points to use of said programming languages and thus increasing demand for their services. (If nobody uses Haskell because GHC has a major bug, nobody is going to hire a Haskell consultancy like Well-Typed, either. In the sales funnel, you have to have customers entering the funnel to get any customers out.) - art tools vs artists: media design tools like Autodesk’s AutoCAD/
Maya vs FLOSS alternatives like Blender, the latter of which are supported by commercial users such as the animation studio Khara feeling the pain. Other examples include Netflix sponsoring development of 4k HDR anime (which would be highly-bandwidth-intensive to stream)
TTRPG game publishers vs themselves’ “open gaming”:
In 2000, Wizards of the Coast (owner of Dungeons & Dragons) executive Ryan Dancey masterminded the creation of the Open Game License, modeled on the GPL, and the release of the 3rd Edition’s core d20 System rules under the Open Game License; Dancey’s reasoning was explicitly based on the idea that by open-sourcing D&D, that would help it prevail over the constant stream of tabletop RPG competitors through network effects, and drive sales of the (expensive) core rulebook, the Player Handbook
game portals vs game devs: Valve: Steam vs game developers/
studios such as Epic Games7 Steam can be seen as a ‘console maker’, and exemplifying console makers vs game devs: the success of Epic Games’s Fortnite is attributed in part to its use of the cross-platform Unreal game engine, allowing it to run seamlessly on all major PC, mobile, and consoles (“Microsoft Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, Android”); when Sony tried to maintain the usual PlayStation 4 walled-garden by breaking interoperability with Fortnite players on other platforms, the backlash forced it to announce it would compromise, and Epic Games simply opted out of Android’s walled garden & Google’s cut of revenue, saving Epic Games more than $50 million annually.
apps vs OSes: Linux (“SteamOS”) vs Microsoft Windows (“Gabe I think saw it as a stick to beat Microsoft with—and he was absolutely correct, it worked.”)
games vs game hardware: VR: Valve’s Vive vs Facebook Oculus.
Valve will be fine if Vive doesn’t win the VR market as long as no one else wins too—because no one makes money on computer games except… Steam. While for Oculus, the danger is in becoming just an expensive hardware peripheral, whose parts they don’t manufacture but merely assemble against a standard software interface, where they are forced to compete against cut-rate Chinese manufacturing giants for near-zero profit margin, a rerun of the smartphone market (a similar market, as they even use the same screens). The danger of lockin to an Oculus/
Facebook walled garden is clear to gamers, and has made life difficult for Oculus: they can’t push exclusives too hard or be as aggressive in fighting outsiders as they want, lest they spark a backlash or cripple the VR market as a whole. Which makes it interesting—both Vive and Oculus have incentives to cooperate… for now. But there’s constant pressure for a betrayal when a player gets desperate or decides the market has matured and it’s time to break for the finish line, like Microsoft releasing IE. publishers vs esports teams: game publishers, due to DRM & forcing matches to go through publishers, have a death-grip over their platforms, and publishers like Riot Games or Blizzard Entertainment have been careful to maintain control over their esports lest the tail wag the dog, weakening teams by downplaying team merchandise & regularly adding in IP requirements & taking revenue cuts upfront
telecoms vs users: ISPS vs tech companies via Net neutrality (eg spectrum auctions, Google Fiber, zero-rating)
eg Jio Reliance, an Indian telecom ISP, disrupted the Indian mobile Internet market by cannibalizing existing margins, under the logic that after commoditizing data & voice, it’ll profit (China/
Africa-style) off broadband & “content, financial services and advertising”8 networking hardware manufacturers vs Internet companies: special-purpose networking hardware (especially Cisco Systems) vs Software-defined networking (as employed by Google/
Microsoft/ Amazon/ cloud giants) People are always surprised how much custom silicon goes into a datacenter server or a smartphone (it’s computers all the way down), but a company like Apple or Amazon cannot risk being held up by a would-be monopolist like Intel, thus the perennial interest in fabbing their own custom chips or dabbling in chips from Intel rivals ARM & AMD—cutting-edge CPUs, however, remain hard and expensive enough to design & make that no one has yet succeeded in commoditizing top-end x86 CPUs, and these moves remain largely negotiating ploys or improvements for niche use-cases
- RISC-V vs x86/
ARM : pretty much the only reason the tech industry funds RISC-V is to keep the incumbents on their toes - Machine Learning: Nvidia’s GPUs/
CUDA vs AMD/ OpenCL vs Google TensorFlow/ TPUs
- RISC-V vs x86/
smartphones (lots):
OS vs Manufacturers: Windows Mobile/
Android/ iOS vs smartphone manufacturers OS vs apps: iOS/
apps: to put it bluntly, “Apple Doesn’t Want Your iPhone App to Make Money” and if your app does anyway, it’ll take a 30% cut. Note for example: the incompatibility of video call apps across platforms, or the fight between Samsung Bixby/ Google Assistant & services - Google Maps vs OpenStreetMap (OSM) vs Mapillary: the dominance of Google Maps has led to dissatisfaction with its steep price increases and limits, Apple replaced Google Maps on iPhones with Apple Maps in 2012 despite serious quality problems (similar moves were made by FourSquare & Craigslist), and rivals like Yahoo!/
Microsoft/ Facebook/ have supported OSM as a counterweight and many corporations actively contribute to OSM improvements (eg FB deep learning efforts). Facebook outright bought Mapillary in June 2020, apparently to… release their data for free commercial use.DigitalGlobe/ Telenav
- Google Maps vs OpenStreetMap (OSM) vs Mapillary: the dominance of Google Maps has led to dissatisfaction with its steep price increases and limits, Apple replaced Google Maps on iPhones with Apple Maps in 2012 despite serious quality problems (similar moves were made by FourSquare & Craigslist), and rivals like Yahoo!/
Designer vs Manufacturers: Qualcomm vs Apple with Intel as wedge
Designer vs Telecoms: iPhone vs telecom ISPs: demand for the iPhone was so enormous it was used as a wedge to force cellphone networks into allowing things they didn’t want—such as letting a large fraction of all smartphones on their network out of their control and extracting unusual concessions
genome sequencer manufacturers vs doctors/
researchers : Illumina vs 23andMe & BGI:The Illuminati have a notorious stranglehold on the genome sequencing market, with enough of an Intel-style lead in consumables efficiency that they can drop prices just enough to suppress competitors (this is may what is behind the occasional inexplicable “pauses” in the famous graph of genome sequencing cost dropping exponentially over time); in response to the high prices, heavy users of genome sequencing have launched desperate attempts to escape the Illumina monopoly, such as BGI’s ill-fated acquisition of Complete Genomics whose sequencers ultimately proved inadequate after sowing internal chaos & wrecking many projects; rumor has it that 23andMe launched its own very expensive internal attempt to develop replacement genome sequencers, and this was a major contributor to its financial woes after the FDA debacle.
ride-sharing service vs drivers: Uber/
Lyft vs self-employed drivers vs self-driving cars Car Software Devs vs Car Manufacturers: self-driving car developers like Google Waymo vs car manufacturers like Honda (the Honda-Waymo partnership fell apart in 2018 reportedly because Honda wanted access to the AI & software of Waymo, and Waymo, for reasons that should be clear now, refused; Honda was forced to invest in rival GM’s Cruise). As the WSJ describes automakers’ thinking:
The global auto industry thinks it sees the future, and it will require a transformation without precedent in business history: The giant industrial sector has to turn itself into a nimble provider of software and services…Auto executives say they need to avoid a nightmare tech scenario that’s become a common refrain at industry gatherings. They don’t want to become the next “handset makers”—commodity suppliers of hardware, helplessly watching all the profits flow to software makers like Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc., the parent of Google. Both companies are investing in software for driverless cars.
voice synthesizers vs singers: Crypton’s Vocaloid vs singers: the voice-synthesizer software sparked an amateur explosion of song production, as apparently even finicky software made high-quality singing far more accessible; Crypton sells the software and maintains control over specific characters like Hatsune Miku (sampled from minor voice actress Saki Fujita), particularly over all licensing and commercial revenue, which formerly would have to be shared with the human idol.
Note the segmentation—software like Vocaloid synthesizers empower the musicians (who can now produce high-quality, competitive with humans given enough tweaking, vocals to go along with their music) at the expense of the more-specialized singers. (A singer can produce their own version of a Vocaloid hit, but are no longer a chokepoint.)
- An emerging variant of this is the Virtual YouTuber genre.
Internet services vs manufacturers: FB’s Open Compute Project providing free designs like Open Rack for building efficient datacenters, and acquisitions of Instagram/
WhatsApp - FLOSS vs SaaS: Elastic vs Amazon/
Netflix/ Expedia: Elasticsearch is text-search software for large-scale document searches; it is commercialized by Elastic, which follows a split-FLOSS model where the core Elasticsearch is FLOSS but features critical for large-scale commercial use (like ‘any security’) are closed-source & must be licensed. In response to Elastic de-emphasizing the FLOSS and increasingly switching development to closed-source-only, on 2019-03-11, Amazon/ Netflix/ —who offer Elasticsearch as part of their cloud offerings or rely on it internally—announced a fork, “Open Distro for Elasticsearch”. Conversely, consider Amazon AWS vs Kubernetes/Expedia Docker. (As one of the main cloud providers, Amazon is merely one the most visible & criticized practitioners of this kind of enclosure, but, rhetoric about ‘strip-mining’ aside, of course this sort of thing is why much FLOSS software is funded in the first place by entities large and small & those complaining often benefit enormously from commoditize-your-complement fights elsewhere—what OSes do they all run on, for example?)
- FLOSS vs SaaS: Elastic vs Amazon/
image hosts vs social media services: Imgur vs Reddit: “The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit’s Native Image Hosting”
media companies vs the Internet: Vevo vs YouTube (“a former YouTube exec” is quoted as saying “Huge huge success for YouTube…YouTube needed Vevo to exist for just long enough to become so popular that the labels had no leverage anymore.”) , Hulu vs Netflix/
Amazon/ BitTorrent… search engines vs market operators:
Darknet Markets: many DNMs provided an API for the DNM search engine “Grams” when small9, then neglected or revoked it at some point; this has an easy interpretation: DNM sellers and buyers want markets to be commodities that they can smoothly move their reputations & business between as DNMs go up or down (as they historically have); while of course, markets want vendors to be trapped and locked into them, and the market able to charge high commissions for the privilege of being where buyers go to find drugs
Booking Agencies vs Hotels/
Airlines : exemplified by the story of Room Key and Booking.com- more recently, they are now all pitted against search engines as that is where customers start
Restaurants:
- Restaurants vs Reservation Booking Companies: eg OpenTable/
SevenRooms - Restaurants vs Food Order Apps: Internet/
mobile app companies like Seamless/ Grubhub/ Uber Eats/ DoorDash aggregate customers for ordering food locally, but of course, they take a large slice of revenue in an industry with already razor-thin, driving restaurants to smaller more-specialized competitors like Slice
- Restaurants vs Reservation Booking Companies: eg OpenTable/
Venture Capital: Y Combinator: running Hacker News, releasing “SAFE” notes & sales templates, developing Startup School
See Also
External Links
Many examples can be seen in Jimmy Maher’s PC gaming history “The Digital Antiquarian”:
“In the Beginning was the Command Line”, Neal Stephenson
“Aggregation Theory”, Ben Thompson
FLOSS:
- “The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free”
- “The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable?”
- “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, Nadia Eghbal 2016; “Is npm worth $2.6MM?”
- “Open Source Archetypes: A Framework For Purposeful Open Source”
Appendix
Information Rules
Quotes from Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Shapiro & Varian 1999:
“Chapter 1: The Information Economy”:
Traditional rules of competitive strategy focus on competitors, suppliers, and customers. In the information economy, companies selling complementary components, or complementors, are equally important. When you are selling one component of a system, you can’t compete if you’re not compatible with the rest of the system. Many of our strategic principles are specifically designed to help companies selling one component of an information system.
The dependence of information technology on systems means that firms must focus not only on their competitors but also on their collaborators. Forming alliances, cultivating partners, and ensuring compatibility (or lack of compatibility!) are critical business decisions…The history of the Microsoft-Intel partnership is a classic example. Microsoft focused almost exclusively on software, while Intel focused almost exclusively on hardware. They each made numerous strategic alliances and acquisitions that built on their strengths. The key for each company has been to commoditize complementary products without eroding the value of its own core strengths. For example, Intel has entered new product spaces such as chipsets and motherboards to improve the performance of these components and thereby stimulate demand for its core product: microprocessors. Intel has helped to create a highly competitive industry in component parts such as video cards, sound cards, and hard drives as well as in the assembly and distribution of personal computers.
Microsoft has its following of independent software vendors (ISVs), and both companies have extensive licensing programs with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). And they each have each other, an extraordinarily productive, if necessarily tense, marriage. It’s in the interest of each company to create multiple sources for its partner’s piece of the system but to prevent the emergence of a strong rival for its own piece. This tension arises over and over again in the information technology sector; Microsoft and Intel are merely the most visible, and profitable, example of the complex dynamics that arise in assembling information systems.
From “Chapter 8: Cooperation and Compatibility”:
…Standards that “don’t quite work” are the bane of customers. It used to be that you were never quite sure exactly which video cards would work with which sound cards; your PC maker added value by making sure that the components in the system you ordered all worked together. Nowadays, pretty much all PC hardware works together because of efforts by Intel and Microsoft to promulgate industry standards. This has been great for Intel and Microsoft but has partially commoditized the PC OEM business, in which competition is increasingly based on being the low-cost producer and distributor.
“Chapter 3: Versioning Information”:
Bargain Finder is a case in point. Brian Krulwich, a researcher at Andersen Consulting, designed a little program that would search online CD stores for the best prices for music CDs. Bargain Finder was an immediate hit on the Web: it had more than 100,000 uses in the first two months it was available. But after a few months of use, three of the eight stores that Bargain Finder searched decided to prevent it from accessing their price lists.
Remember the first lesson in Chapter 2? Avoid commoditization. The on-line CD stores didn’t want to compete on price alone. They wanted to compete on service and value added. By allowing Bargain Finder to look only at one dimension of what the stores offered, they ended up commoditizing their product.
This sort of commoditization may be hard to avoid with Internet shopping. Services like PriceScan compile lists of advertised prices for computer equipment and consumer electronics. This is a great service for consumers, but it will make the retailing market even more cutthroat than it already is.
“Chapter 9: Waging a Standards War”:
Commoditizing Complementary Products: Once you’ve won, you want to keep your network alive and healthy. This means that you’ve got to attend not only to your own products but to the products produced by your complementors as well. Your goal should be to retain your franchise as the market leader but encourage a vibrant and competitive market for complements to your product.
This can be tricky. Apple has flipped back and forth on its developer relations over the years. First it just wanted to be in the computer business and let others develop applications. Then it established a subsidiary, Corbis, to do applications development. When this soured relations with other developers, Apple spun Corbis off. And so it went—a back-and-forth dance.
Microsoft faced the same problem, but with a somewhat different strategy. If an applications developer became successful, Microsoft just bought it out! Or tried to—Microsoft’s intended purchase of Intuit was blocked by the Department of Justice. Nowadays a lot of new business plans in the software industry have the same structure: “Produce product, capture emerging market, be bought by Microsoft.”
Enter adjacent markets only if integration adds value for consumers.
Our view is that you should try to maintain a competitive market in complementary products and avoid the temptation to meddle. Enter into these markets only if (1) integration of your core product with adjacent products adds value to consumers or (2) you can inject significant additional competition to keep prices low. If you are truly successful, like Intel, you will need to spur innovation in complementary products to help fuel growth.
…When you’ve won your war, don’t rest easy. Cater to your installed base and avoid complacency. Don’t let the desire for backward compatibility hobble your ability to improve your product; doing so will leave you open to an entrant employing a revolution strategy. Commoditize complementary products to make your systems more attractive to consumers.
Link Bibliography
Bibliography of page links in reading order (with annotations when available):
“Joel Spolsky”, (2021-01-02):
Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog. In 2008, he launched the Stack Overflow programmer Q&A site in collaboration with Jeff Atwood. Using the Stack Exchange software product which powers Stack Overflow, the Stack Exchange Network now hosts over 170 Q&A sites.
https:/
/ www.amazon.com/ Joel-Software-Occasionally-Developers-Designers/ dp/ 1590593898 https:/
/ www.joelonsoftware.com/ 2002/ 06/ 12/ strategy-letter-v/ https:/
/ slashdot.org/ story/ 02/ 06/ 17/ 1433221/ joel-on-the-economics-of-open-source “Carl Shapiro”, (2021-01-02):
Carl Shapiro is the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the co-author, along with Hal Varian, of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, published by the Harvard Business School Press. On February 23, 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that President Barack Obama intended to nominate Shapiro to his Council of Economic Advisers.
“Hal Varian”, (2021-01-02):
Hal Ronald Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics. He is the chief economist at Google and he holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information.
https:/
/ www.amazon.com/ Information-Rules-Strategic-Network-Economy/ dp/ 087584863X “Substitute good”, (2020-12-22):
In microeconomics, two goods are substitutes if the products could be used for the same purpose by the consumers. That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.
“Complementary good”, (2021-01-02):
In economics, a complementary good is a good whose appeal increases with the popularity of its complement. Technically, it displays a negative cross elasticity of demand and that demand for it increases when the price of another good decreases. If A is a complement to B, an increase in the price of A will result in a negative movement along the demand curve of A and cause the demand curve for B to shift inward; less of each good will be demanded. Conversely, a decrease in the price of A will result in a positive movement along the demand curve of A and cause the demand curve of B to shift outward; more of each good will be demanded. This is in contrast to a substitute good, whose demand decreases when its substitute's price decreases.
“IBM”, (2021-01-02):
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology and consulting company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with more than 350,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries.
“IBM Personal Computer”, (2020-12-28):
The IBM Personal Computer is the first computer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team of engineers and designers directed by Don Estridge in Boca Raton, Florida.
https:/
/ tech-insider.org/ personal-computers/ research/ 1990/ 09.html “IBM System/23 Datamaster”, (2021-01-02):
The System/23 Datamaster was announced by IBM in July 1981. The Datamaster was the least expensive IBM computer until the far less expensive and far more popular IBM PC was announced in the following month.
“Industry Standard Architecture”, (2021-01-02):
Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles.
“Micro Channel architecture”, (2021-01-02):
Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, was a proprietary 16- or 32-bit parallel computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on PS/2 and other computers until the mid-1990s. Its name is commonly abbreviated as "MCA", although not by IBM. In IBM products, it superseded the ISA bus and was itself subsequently superseded by the PCI bus architecture.
“IBM PC DOS”, (2021-01-02):
IBM PC DOS, an acronym for IBM personal computer disk operating system, is a discontinued operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, manufactured and sold by IBM from the early 1980s into the 2000s.
“Compaq”, (2021-01-02):
Compaq was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the first company to legally reverse engineer the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s before being overtaken by HP in 2001. Struggling to keep up in the price wars against Dell, as well as with a risky acquisition of DEC, Compaq was acquired for US$25 billion by HP in 2002. The Compaq brand remained in use by HP for lower-end systems until 2013 when it was discontinued.
“MS-DOS”, (2021-01-02):
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and some operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS". MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system.
“Louis V. Gerstner Jr.”, (2021-01-02):
Louis Vincent Gerstner Jr. is an American businessman, best known for his tenure as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of IBM from April 1993 until 2002, when he retired as CEO in March and chairman in December. He is largely credited with turning IBM's fortunes around.
“GNU Manifesto”, (2021-01-02):
The GNU Manifesto is a call-to-action by Richard Stallman encouraging participation and support of the GNU Project's goal in developing the GNU free computer operating system. The GNU Manifesto was published in March 1985 in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools. It is held in high regard within the free software movement as a fundamental philosophical source.
/
docs/ economics/ 2002-schonfeld-thisisyourfathersibmonlysmarter.html “Netscape”, (2020-12-22):
Netscape Communications Corporation was an independent American computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006. Netscape created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.
“Netscape”, (2020-12-22):
Netscape Communications Corporation was an independent American computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006. Netscape created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.
“Netscape (web browser)”, (2021-01-02):
The Netscape web browser is the general name for a series of web browsers formerly produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, a former subsidiary of AOL. The original browser was once the dominant browser in terms of usage share, but as a result of the first browser war, it lost virtually all of its share to Internet Explorer.
“Oracle iPlanet Web Server”, (2020-12-22):
Oracle iPlanet Web Server (OiWS) is a web server designed for medium and large business applications. Oracle iPlanet Web Server builds on the earlier Sun Java System Web Server, Sun ONE Web Server, iPlanet Web Server, and Netscape Enterprise Server products.
“Netscape Application Server”, (2020-12-22):
Netscape Application Server was an integrated software platform for developing and running transaction-oriented business applications on the web. It was developed originally by Kiva Software, which Netscape acquired in 1997.
“Transmeta”, (2020-12-22):
Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.
“Linus Torvalds”, (2021-01-02):
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a software engineer who is the creator and, historically, the principal developer of the Linux kernel for Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system Git and the scuba dive logging and planning software Subsurface.
“Linux”, (2021-01-02):
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution.
“Sun Microsystems”, (2021-01-02):
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
“Hewlett-Packard”, (2021-01-02):
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard or HP,, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components, as well as software and related services to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises, including customers in the government, health and education sectors. The company was founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939, and initially produced a line of electronic test and measurement equipment. The HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue is now designated an official California Historical Landmark, and is marked with a plaque calling it the "Birthplace of 'Silicon Valley'".
“Ximian”, (2020-12-22):
Ximian, Inc. was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman in 1999 and was bought by Novell in 2003. Novell continued to develop Ximian's original products, while adding support for its own GroupWise and ZENworks software.
“GNOME”, (2021-01-02):
GNOME is a free and open-source desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. GNOME was originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, but the acronym was dropped because it no longer reflected the vision of the GNOME project.
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, (2021-01-02):
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design. The essay was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in Würzburg (Germany) and was published as part of the book in 1999.
“Windowing system”, (2021-01-02):
In computing, a windowing system is
software
that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP paradigm for a user interface.“NeWS”, (2021-01-02):
NeWS is a discontinued windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal. The NeWS interpreter was based on PostScript extending it to allow interaction and multiple "contexts" to support windows. Like PostScript, NeWS could be used as a complete programming language, but unlike PostScript, NeWS could be used to make complete interactive programs with mouse support and a GUI.
“NewWave”, (2021-01-02):
NewWave is a discontinued object-oriented graphical desktop environment and office productivity tool for PCs running early versions of Microsoft Windows. It was developed by Hewlett-Packard and introduced commercially in 1988. It was used on the HP Vectras and other IBM compatible PCs running MS Windows.
“StarOffice”, (2021-01-02):
StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before being discontinued in 2011, is a proprietary office suite. It originated in 1985 as StarWriter by Star Division, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun Microsystems, in turn, was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010.
“Java (software platform)”, (2021-01-02):
Java is a set of computer software and specifications developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, which was later acquired by the Oracle Corporation, that provides a system for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform computing environment. Java is used in a wide variety of computing platforms from embedded devices and mobile phones to enterprise servers and supercomputers. Java applets, which are less common than standalone Java applications, were commonly run in secure, sandboxed environments to provide many features of native applications through being embedded in HTML pages.
“Java bytecode”, (2020-12-22):
Java bytecode is the instruction set of the Java virtual machine (JVM).
“.NET Framework”, (2021-01-02):
.NET Framework is a deprecated software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large class library called Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework.
“Bytecode”, (2020-12-22):
Bytecode, also termed portable code or p-code, is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects.
“Microsoft Excel”, (2021-01-02):
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in 1993, and it has replaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the industry standard for spreadsheets. Excel forms part of the Microsoft Office suite of software.
“OS/2”, (2021-01-02):
OS/2 is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 relative to Microsoft's new Windows 3.1 operating environment, the two companies severed the relationship in 1992 and OS/2 development fell to IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers. The first version of OS/2 was released in December 1987 and newer versions were released until December 2001.
“QuarkXPress”, (2021-01-02):
QuarkXPress is a desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and published by them.
“Apache HTTP Server”, (2021-01-02):
The Apache HTTP Server, colloquially called Apache, is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.
“Sun acquisition by Oracle”, (2020-12-22):
The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. Significantly, Oracle, previously only a software vendor, now owned both hardware and software product lines from Sun.
http:/
/ www.catb.org/ ~esr/ writings/ cathedral-bazaar/ magic-cauldron/ ar01s11.html “Internet Information Services”, (2021-01-02):
Internet Information Services is an extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. It has been an integral part of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 4.0, though it may be absent from some editions, and is not active by default.
“IBM WebSphere”, (2020-12-22):
IBM WebSphere refers to a brand of proprietary computer software products in the genre of enterprise software known as "application and integration middleware". These software products are used by end-users to create and integrate applications with other applications. IBM WebSphere has been available to the general market since 1998.
“X Window System”, (2021-01-02):
The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
“Digital Equipment Corporation”, (2020-12-22):
Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline.
“Two-sided market”, (2020-12-22):
A two-sided market, also called a two-sided network, is an intermediary economic platform having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. The organization that creates value primarily by enabling direct interactions between two distinct types of affiliated customers is called a multi-sided platform. This concept of two-sided markets has been mainly theorised by the French economists Jean Tirole and Jean-Charles Rochet.
“Symbian”, (2021-01-02):
Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. Symbian was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for PDAs in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010—at a time when smartphones were in limited use—when it was overtaken by iOS and Android. It was notably not as popular in North America.
“IOS”, (2021-01-02):
iOS is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPod Touch; the term also included the versions running on iPads until the name iPadOS was introduced with version 13 in 2019. It is the world's second-most widely installed mobile operating system, after Android. It is the basis for three other operating systems made by Apple: iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It is proprietary software, although some parts of it are open source under the Apple Public Source License and other licenses.
“Android (operating system)”, (2021-01-02):
Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of developers known as the Open Handset Alliance and commercially sponsored by Google. It was unveiled in November 2007, with the first commercial Android device launched in September 2008.
“Shapley value”, (2021-01-02):
The Shapley value is a solution concept in cooperative game theory. It was named in honor of Lloyd Shapley, who introduced it in 1951 and won the Nobel Prize in Economics for it in 2012. To each cooperative game it assigns a unique distribution of a total surplus generated by the coalition of all players. The Shapley value is characterized by a collection of desirable properties. Hart (1989) provides a survey of the subject.
“Economic surplus”, (2021-01-02):
In mainstream economics, economic surplus, also known as total welfare or Marshallian surplus, refers to two related quantities:
- Consumer surplus, or consumers' surplus, is the monetary gain obtained by consumers because they are able to purchase a product for a price that is less than the highest price that they would be willing to pay.
- Producer surplus, or producers' surplus, is the amount that producers benefit by selling at a market price that is higher than the least that they would be willing to sell for; this is roughly equal to profit.
“Vertical integration”, (2021-01-02):
In microeconomics, management, and international political economy, vertical integration refers to an arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is integrated and owned by that company. Usually each member of the supply chain produces a different product or (market-specific) service, and the products combine to satisfy a common need. It is contrasted with horizontal integration, wherein a company produces several items that are related to one another. Vertical integration has also described management styles that bring large portions of the supply chain not only under a common ownership but also into one corporation.
https:/
/ techcrunch.com/ 2013/ 11/ 08/ why-apple-bought-578m-worth-of-sapphire-in-advance/ https:/
/ www.wsj.com/ articles/ inside-apples-broken-sapphire-factory-1416436043 -
Even if designers don’t contribute improvements to a font directly, companies can benefit from making their work open source. For example, Adobe Type senior manager Dan Rhatigan says releasing its Source super-family of fonts as open source has enabled the company to test new typography technologies like “variable fonts,” which make it easy for a designer to adjust the weight of a typeface, before rolling those technologies into other products.
In other cases, open source fonts help support other aspects of a company’s business. For example, Google Fonts program manager Dave Crossland says many of the fonts Google has funded most recently are designed for under-supported languages in developing countries. These efforts buttress Google’s “Next Billion Users” initiative, which aims to bring more people in developing countries online. Better support for more languages means more users, and ultimately, more money for Google.
The incentives to create open source fonts weren’t always obvious. In early 2009, a graphic designer and programmer named Micah Rich came across a forum post by a student who was interested in knowing more about how fonts worked. The student asked whether there was a professional quality open source font that they could learn from. The replies weren’t kind. “There were like 20 pages of professional type designers saying ‘This is our livelihood, how dare you ask us to work for free?’” Rich says.
“TrueType”, (2020-12-22):
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
“GitLab”, (2021-01-02):
GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and continuous integration and deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc. The software was created by Ukrainian developers Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov.
“GitHub”, (2021-01-02):
GitHub, Inc. is a subsidiary of Microsoft which provides hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git, plus its own features. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, continuous integration and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
“npm is joining GitHub”, (2020-03-16):
I’m excited to announce that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire npm.
npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they’ve helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm’s story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.
For the millions of developers who use the public npm registry every day, npm will always be available and always be free. Our focus after the deal closes will be to:
- Invest in the registry infrastructure and platform.
- Improve the core experience.
- Engage with the community.
Looking further ahead, we’ll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it…We are also investing heavily in GitHub Packages as a great multi-language packages registry that’s fully integrated with GitHub. Later this year, we will enable npm’s paying customers to move their private npm packages to GitHub Packages—allowing npm to exclusively focus on being a great public registry for JavaScript.
“OS/360 and successors”, (2021-01-02):
OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB and Input/Output Control System (IOCS) packages for the IBM 7090/7094 and even more so by the PR155 Operating System for the IBM 1410/7010 processors. It was one of the earliest operating systems to require the computer hardware to include at least one direct access storage device.
https:/
/ www.nytimes.com/ 2018/ 02/ 20/ magazine/ the-case-against-google.html “PowerPC”, (2021-01-02):
PowerPC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been named Power ISA, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.
https:/
/ www.nextplatform.com/ 2019/ 08/ 20/ big-blue-open-sources-power-chip-instruction-set/ “Interchange fee”, (2021-01-02):
Interchange fee is a term used in the payment card industry to describe a fee paid between banks for the acceptance of card-based transactions. Usually for sales/services transactions it is a fee that a merchant's bank pays a customer's bank ; and for cash transactions the interchange fee is paid from the issuer to acquirer, often called reverse interchange.
“Academic publishing”, (2021-01-02):
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal article, book or thesis form. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
“Lisp machine”, (2021-01-02):
Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations. Despite being modest in number, Lisp machines commercially pioneered many now-commonplace technologies, including effective garbage collection, laser printing, windowing systems, computer mice, high-resolution bit-mapped raster graphics, computer graphic rendering, and networking innovations such as Chaosnet. Several firms built and sold Lisp machines in the 1980s: Symbolics, Lisp Machines Incorporated, Texas Instruments, and Xerox. The operating systems were written in Lisp Machine Lisp, Interlisp (Xerox), and later partly in Common Lisp.
“Jon Mittelhauser”, (2020-12-22):
Jon E. Mittelhauser is a software executive who co-wrote the Windows version of NCSA Mosaic and was a founder of Netscape.
“Lawrence Lessig”, (2021-01-02):
Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but withdrew before the primaries.
“Red Hat”, (2021-01-02):
Red Hat, Inc. is an American multinational software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. It became a subsidiary of IBM on July 9, 2019.
“XEmacs”, (2021-01-02):
XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows. XEmacs is a fork, based on a version of GNU Emacs from the late 1980s. Any user can download, use, and modify XEmacs as free software available under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.
“Eclipse (software)”, (2021-01-02):
Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. Eclipse is written mostly in Java and its primary use is for developing Java applications, but it may also be used to develop applications in other programming languages via plug-ins, including Ada, ABAP, C, C++, C#, Clojure, COBOL, D, Erlang, Fortran, Groovy, Haskell, JavaScript, Julia, Lasso, Lua, NATURAL, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, and Scheme. It can also be used to develop documents with LaTeX and packages for the software Mathematica. Development environments include the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) for Java and Scala, Eclipse CDT for C/C++, and Eclipse PDT for PHP, among others.
“Autodesk”, (2020-12-22):
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered in San Rafael, California, and features a gallery of its customers' work in its San Francisco building. The company has offices worldwide. Its U.S. locations are California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Its Canada offices are located in Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta.
“AutoCAD”, (2021-01-02):
AutoCAD is a commercial computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application. Developed and marketed by Autodesk, AutoCAD was first released in December 1982 as a desktop app running on microcomputers with internal graphics controllers. Before AutoCAD was introduced, most commercial CAD programs ran on mainframe computers or minicomputers, with each CAD operator (user) working at a separate graphics terminal. AutoCAD is also available as mobile and web app.
“Autodesk Maya”, (2021-01-02):
Autodesk Maya, commonly shortened to just Maya, is a 3D computer graphics application that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, originally developed by Alias Systems Corporation and currently owned and developed by Autodesk. It is used to create assets for interactive 3D applications, animated films, TV series, and visual effects.
“Blender (software)”, (2021-01-02):
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality and computer games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing.
https:/
/ www.blender.org/ user-stories/ japanese-anime-studio-khara-moving-to-blender/ /
docs/ anime/ 2020-04-02-netflix-bringing4kandhdrtoanimeatnetflixwithsollevante.html “Tabletop role-playing game”, (2021-01-02):
A tabletop role-playing game, also known as a pen-and-paper role-playing game, is a form of role-playing game (RPG) in which the participants describe their characters' actions through speech. Participants determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization, and the actions succeed or fail according to a set formal system of rules and guidelines. Within the rules, players have the freedom to improvise; their choices shape the direction and outcome of the game.
“Open gaming”, (2020-12-22):
Open gaming is a movement within the tabletop role-playing game (RPG) industry with superficial similarities to the open source software movement. The key aspect is that copyright holders license their works under public copyright licenses that permit others to make copies or create derivative works of the game.
“Wizards of the Coast”, (2021-01-02):
Wizards of the Coast LLC is an American publisher of games, primarily based on fantasy and science fiction themes, and formerly an operator of retail stores for games. Originally a role-playing game publisher, the company originated and popularized the collectible card game genre with Magic: The Gathering in the mid-1990s. It also acquired the popular Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game by purchasing the failing company TSR, and further increased its success by publishing the licensed Pokémon Trading Card Game. The company's corporate headquarters are located in Renton, Washington, United States.
“Dungeons & Dragons”, (2021-01-02):
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR). It has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997. The game was derived from miniature wargames, with a variation of the 1971 game Chainmail serving as the initial rule system. D&D's publication is commonly recognized as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry.
“Ryan Dancey”, (2020-12-22):
Ryan S. Dancey is a businessman who has worked primarily in the collectible card game and role-playing game industries. He was vice president in charge of Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast.
“Open Game License”, (2020-12-22):
The Open Game License (OGL) is a public copyright license by Wizards of the Coast that may be used by tabletop role-playing game developers to grant permission to modify, copy, and redistribute some of the content designed for their games, notably game mechanics. However, they must share-alike copies and derivative works.
“GNU General Public License”, (2021-01-02):
The GNU General Public License is a series of widely-used free software licenses that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software. The licenses were originally written by Richard Stallman, former head of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project, and grant the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. This is in distinction to permissive software licenses, of which the BSD licenses and the MIT License are widely used, less restrictive examples. GPL was the first copyleft license for general use.
“Editions of Dungeons & Dragons”, (2020-12-22):
Several different editions of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game have been produced since 1974. The current publisher of D&D, Wizards of the Coast, produces new materials only for the most current edition of the game. Many D&D fans, however, continue to play older versions of the game and some third-party companies continue to publish materials compatible with these older editions.
“D20 System”, (2020-12-22):
The d20 System is a role-playing game system published in 2000 by Wizards of the Coast, originally developed for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The system is named after the 20-sided dice which are central to the core mechanics of many actions in the game.
“Interview with Ryan Dancey: D20 System and Open Gaming Movement”, (2000-03-09):
Q. Can you briefly summarize what the Open Gaming Movement is about? Where did it come from, and what does it mean to the average gamer?
A. Sure. Prepare yourself for a big gulp of business theory…That brings us to Open Gaming, and why we’re pursuing this initiative inside Wizards and outside to the larger community of game publishers.
Here’s the logic in a nutshell. We’ve got a theory that says that D&D is the most popular role playing game because it is the game more people know how to play than any other game. (For those of you interested researching the theory, this concept is called “The Theory of Network Externalities”). Note: This is a very painful concept for a lot of people to embrace, including a lot of our own staff, and including myself for many years. The idea that D&D is somehow “better” than the competition is a powerful and entrenched concept. The idea that D&D can be “beaten” by a game that is “better” than D&D is at the heart of every business plan from every company that goes into marketplace battle with the D&D game. If you accept the Theory of Network Externalities, you have to admit that the battle is lost before it begins, because the value doesn’t reside in the game itself, but in the network of people who know how to play it.
If you accept (as I have finally come to do) that the theory is valid, then the logical conclusion is that the larger the number of people who play D&D, the harder it is for competitive games to succeed, and the longer people will stay active gamers, and the more value the network of D&D players will have to Wizards of the Coast. In fact, we believe that there may be a secondary market force we jokingly call “The Skaff Effect”, after our own Skaff Elias. Skaff is one of the smartest guys in the company, and after looking at lots of trends and thinking about our business over a long period of time, he enunciated his theory thusly:
“All marketing and sales activity in a hobby gaming genre eventually contributes to the overall success of the market share leader in that genre.”
In other words, the more money other companies spend on their games, the more D&D sales are eventually made. Now, there are clearly issues of efficiency—not every dollar input to the market results in a dollar output in D&D sales; and there is a substantial time lag between input and output; and a certain amount of people are diverted from D&D to other games never to return. However, we believe very strongly that the net effect of the competition in the RPG genre is positive for D&D. The downside here is that I believe that one of the reasons that the RPG as a category has declined so much from the early 90’s relates to the proliferation of systems. Every one of those different game systems creates a “bubble” of market inefficiency; the cumulative effect of all those bubbles has proven to be a massive downsizing of the marketplace. I have to note, highlight, and reiterate: The problem is not competitive product, the problem is competitive systems. I am very much for competition and for a lot of interesting and cool products.
So much for the dry theory and background. Here’s the logical conclusions we’ve drawn: We make more revenue and more profit from our core rulebooks than any other part of our product lines. In a sense, every other RPG product we sell other than the core rulebooks is a giant, self-financing marketing program to drive sales of those core books. At an extreme view, you could say that the core book of D&D—the PHB [Player’s Handbook rulebook]—is the focus of all this activity, and in fact, the PHB is the #1 best selling, and most profitable RPG product Wizards of the Coast makes year in and year out.
The logical conclusion says that reducing the “cost” to other people to publishing and supporting the core D&D game to zero should eventually drive support for all other game systems to the lowest level possible in the market, create customer resistance to the introduction of new systems, and the result of all that “support” redirected to the D&D game will be to steadily increase the number of people who play D&D, thus driving sales of the core books. This is a feedback cycle—the more effective the support is, the more people play D&D. The more people play D&D, the more effective the support is.
The other great effect of Open Gaming should be a rapid, constant improvement in the quality of the rules. With lots of people able to work on them in public, problems with math, with ease of use, of variance from standard forms, etc. should all be improved over time. The great thing about Open Gaming is that it is interactive—someone figures out a way to make something work better, and everyone who uses that part of the rules is free to incorporate it into their products. Including us. So D&D as a game should benefit from the shared development of all the people who work on the Open Gaming derivative of D&D.
After reviewing all the factors, I think there’s a very, very strong business case that can be made for the idea of embracing the ideas at the heart of the Open Source movement and finding a place for them in gaming.
“Valve Corporation”, (2021-01-02):
Valve Corporation, also known as Valve Software, is an American video game developer, publisher, and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and Dota series.
“Steam (service)”, (2021-01-02):
Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve. It was launched as a standalone software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games, and expanded to include games from third-party publishers. Steam has also expanded into an online web-based and mobile digital storefront. Steam offers digital rights management (DRM), server hosting, video streaming, and social networking services. It also provides the user with installation and automatic updating of games, and community features such as friends lists and groups, cloud storage, and in-game voice and chat functionality.
“Epic Games”, (2021-01-02):
Epic Games, Inc. is an American video game and software developer and publisher based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. Following his first commercial video game release, ZZT (1991), the company became Epic MegaGames, Inc. in early 1992 and brought on Mark Rein, who is the company's vice president to date. Moving their headquarters to Cary in 1999, the studio's name was simplified to Epic Games.
https:/
/ variety.com/ 2018/ gaming/ features/ starcraft-ii-esports-history-1202873246/ https:/
/ scholarship.law.upenn.edu/ cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=penn_law_review “Fortnite”, (2020-12-22):
Fortnite is an online video game developed by Epic Games and released in 2017. It is available in three distinct game mode versions that otherwise share the same general gameplay and game engine: Fortnite: Save the World, a cooperative hybrid-tower defense-shooter-survival game for up to four players to fight off zombie-like creatures and defend objects with traps and fortifications they can build; Fortnite Battle Royale, a free-to-play battle royale game in which up to 100 players fight to be the last person standing; and Fortnite Creative, in which players are given complete freedom to create worlds and battle arenas. Save the World and Battle Royale were released in 2017 as early access titles, while Creative was released on December 6, 2018. Save the World is available only for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, while Battle Royale and Creative released for all those platforms, and also for Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android devices. The game is expected to also launch with the release of the next-generation PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.
http:/
/ nymag.com/ selectall/ 2018/ 07/ how-fortnite-became-the-most-popular-video-game-on-earth.html “Unreal Engine”, (2021-01-02):
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although initially developed for first-person shooters, it has been used in a variety of other genres, including platformers, fighting games, and MMORPGs, and has seen adoption by many non-gaming projects. Written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of platforms.
“SteamOS”, (2021-01-02):
SteamOS is the primary operating system for the Steam Machine gaming platform by Valve. It is based on the Debian distribution of Linux.
https:/
/ boilingsteam.com/ an-interview-with-peter-mulholland-ex-vp/ “Virtual reality”, (2021-01-02):
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment and education. Other distinct types of VR-style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality, sometimes referred to as extended reality or XR.
“HTC Vive”, (2021-01-02):
The HTC Vive is a virtual reality headset developed by HTC and Valve. The headset uses "room scale" tracking technology, allowing the user to move in 3D space and use motion-tracked handheld controllers to interact with the environment.
“Oculus (brand)”, (2021-01-02):
Oculus is a brand of Facebook Technologies, LLC, a subsidiary of Facebook Inc. The division produces virtual reality headsets, including the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest lines.
“Esports”, (2021-01-02):
Esports is a form of sport competition using video games. Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, individually or as teams. Although organized competitions have long been a part of video game culture, these were largely between amateurs until the late 2000s, when participation by professional gamers and spectatorship in these events through live streaming saw a large surge in popularity. By the 2010s, esports was a significant factor in the video game industry, with many game developers actively designing and providing funding for tournaments and other events.
“Riot Games”, (2021-01-02):
Riot Games, Inc. is an American video game developer, publisher, and esports tournament organizer based in West Los Angeles, California. The company is best known for League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena game, and has produced several spin-offs in the same franchise. Riot also operates various esports tournaments for the game, including the League of Legends World Championship, the Championship Series, the European Championship, and the Mid-Season Invitational.
“Blizzard Entertainment”, (2021-01-02):
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded on February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce and Allen Adham. The company originally concentrated on the creation of game ports for other studios' games before beginning development of their own software in 1993 with games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. In 1994, the company became Chaos Studios, Inc., then Blizzard Entertainment after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates.
“League of Legends in esports”, (2021-01-02):
League of Legends competition involves professional gamers of the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, League of Legends, first published in 2009 by Riot Games, but regularly patched, including a complete graphical overhaul of the main map in 2014.
“Overwatch League”, (2021-01-02):
The Overwatch League (OWL) is a professional esports league for the video game Overwatch, produced by its developer Blizzard Entertainment. The Overwatch League follows the model of other traditional North American professional sporting leagues by using a set of permanent, city-based teams backed by separate ownership groups. In addition, the league plays in the regular season and playoffs format rather than the use of promotion and relegation used commonly in other esports and non-North American leagues, with players on the roster being assured a minimum annual salary, benefits, and a portion of winnings and revenue-sharing based on team performance. The league was announced in 2016 with its inaugural season taking place in 2018, with a total prize pool of US$3.5 million given to teams that year.
“Net neutrality”, (2021-01-02):
Network neutrality, most commonly called net neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, and not discriminate or charge differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication.
“2008 United States wireless spectrum auction”, (2020-12-22):
The United States 700 MHz FCC wireless spectrum auction, officially known as Auction 73, was started by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on January 24, 2008 for the rights to operate the 700 MHz radio frequency band in the United States. The details of process were the subject of debate among several telecommunications companies, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, as well as the Internet company Google. Much of the debate swirled around the open access requirements set down by the Second Report and Order released by the FCC determining the process and rules for the auction. All bidding was required by law to commence by January 28.
“Google Fiber”, (2020-12-22):
Google Fiber is part of the Access division of Alphabet Inc. It provides fiber-to-the-premises service in the United States, providing broadband Internet and IPTV to a small and slowly increasing number of locations. In mid-2016, Google Fiber had 68,715 television subscribers and was estimated to have about 453,000 broadband customers.
“Zero-rating”, (2021-01-02):
Zero-rating is the practice of providing Internet access without financial cost under certain conditions, such as by permitting access to only certain websites or by subsidizing the service with advertising or by exempting certain websites from the data allowance.
“Jio”, (2021-01-02):
Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, d/b/a Jio, is an Indian telecommunications company and a subsidiary of Jio Platforms, headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It operates a national LTE network with coverage across all 22 telecom circles. It does not offer 2G or 3G service, and instead uses only voice over LTE to provide voice service on its 4G network.
“Mukesh Ambani”, (2021-01-02):
Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani is an Indian billionaire business magnate, and the chairman, managing director, and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), a Fortune Global 500 company and India's most valuable company by market value. He is the second richest person in Asia with a net worth of US$76.5 billion, and as of 23 December 2020, the 21st richest in the world.
“Cisco Systems”, (2021-01-02):
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in San Jose, California, in the center of Silicon Valley. Cisco develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Through its numerous acquired subsidiaries, such as OpenDNS, Webex, Jabber and Jasper, Cisco specializes in specific tech markets, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), domain security and energy management. Cisco is incorporated in California.
“Software-defined networking”, (2020-12-22):
Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing than traditional network management. SDN is meant to address the fact that the static architecture of traditional networks is decentralized and complex while current networks require more flexibility and easy troubleshooting. SDN attempts to centralize network intelligence in one network component by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets from the routing process. The control plane consists of one or more controllers, which are considered the brain of the SDN network where the whole intelligence is incorporated. However, the intelligent centralization has its own drawbacks when it comes to security, scalability and elasticity and this is the main issue of SDN.
https:/
/ www.nextplatform.com/ 2017/ 07/ 17/ google-wants-rewire-internet/ https:/
/ azure.microsoft.com/ en-us/ blog/ microsoft-showcases-the-azure-cloud-switch-acs/ “How Many Computers Are In Your Computer?”, (2018-01-29):
Why are there so many places for backdoors and weird machines in your “computer”? Because your computer is in fact scores or hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of computer chips, many of which are explicitly or implicitly capable of Turing-complete computations (many more powerful than desktops of bygone eras), working together to create the illusion of a single computer. Backdoors, bugs, weird machines, and security do not care about what you think—only where resources can be found and orchestrated into a computation.
“Slowing Moore’s Law: How It Could Happen”, (2012-03-16):
Brain emulation requires enormous computing power; enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore’s law; further Moore’s law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in ever more-advanced chip fabs; cutting-edge chip fabs are both expensive and vulnerable to state actors (but not non-state actors such as terrorists). Therefore: the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by global regulation of chip fabs.
“RISC-V”, (2020-12-22):
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. Unlike most other ISA designs, the RISC-V ISA is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use. A number of companies are offering or have announced RISC-V hardware, open source operating systems with RISC-V support are available and the instruction set is supported in several popular software toolchains.
“X86”, (2021-01-02):
x86 is a family of instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486 processors.
“ARM architecture”, (2020-12-22):
ARM is a family of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments. Arm Holdings develops the architecture and licenses it to other companies, who design their own products that implement one of those architectures—including systems-on-chips (SoC) and systems-on-modules (SoM) that incorporate memory, interfaces, radios, etc. It also designs cores that implement this instruction set and licenses these designs to a number of companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products.
“Nvidia”, (2021-01-02):
Nvidia Corporation is an American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware and based in Santa Clara, California. It designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Its primary GPU product line, labeled "GeForce", is in direct competition with Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD) "Radeon" products. Nvidia expanded its presence in the gaming industry with its handheld Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield Android TV and its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.
“CUDA”, (2021-01-02):
CUDA is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by Nvidia. It allows software developers and software engineers to use a CUDA-enabled graphics processing unit (GPU) for general purpose processing – an approach termed GPGPU. The CUDA platform is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements, for the execution of compute kernels.
“Advanced Micro Devices”, (2021-01-02):
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactured its own processors, the company later outsourced its manufacturing, a practice known as going fabless, after GlobalFoundries was spun off in 2009. AMD's main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers and embedded system applications.
“OpenCL”, (2021-01-02):
OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies programming languages for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism.
“TensorFlow”, (2021-01-02):
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks.
“Tensor Processing Unit”, (2021-01-02):
Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google specifically for neural network machine learning, particularly using Google's own TensorFlow software. Google began using TPUs internally in 2015, and in 2018 made them available for third party use, both as part of its cloud infrastructure and by offering a smaller version of the chip for sale.
https:/
/ stratechery.com/ 2013/ why-doesnt-apple-enable-sustainable-businesses-on-the-app-store/ http:/
/ benton.io/ tech/ 2010/ 04/ 16/ apple-doesnt-want-your-iphone-app-to-make-money.html “Bixby (software)”, (2021-01-02):
Bixby is a virtual assistant developed by Samsung Electronics.
“Google Assistant”, (2021-01-02):
Google Assistant is an artificial intelligence–powered virtual assistant developed by Google that is primarily available on mobile and smart home devices. Unlike the company's previous virtual assistant, Google Now, the Google Assistant can engage in two-way conversations.
“Google Maps”, (2021-01-02):
Google Maps is a web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle, air and public transportation. In 2020, Google Maps was used by over 1 billion people every month.
“OpenStreetMap”, (2021-01-02):
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. The geodata underlying the map is considered the primary output of the project. The creation and growth of OSM has been motivated by restrictions on use or availability of map data across much of the world, and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices.
“Mapillary”, (2021-01-02):
Mapillary is a service for sharing crowdsourced geotagged photos, developed by remote company Mapillary AB, based in Malmö, Sweden.
“Apple Maps”, (2020-12-22):
Apple Maps is a web mapping service developed by Apple Inc. It is the default map system of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. It provides directions and estimated times of arrival for automobile, pedestrian, and public transportation navigation. Apple Maps also features Flyover mode, a feature that enables a user to explore certain densely populated urban centers and other places of interest in a 3D landscape composed of models of buildings and structures.
“Four square”, (2021-01-02):
Four square is a ball game played among four players on a square court divided into quadrants. The objective of four square is to eliminate other players to achieve the highest rank on the court, and this is done by bouncing the ball back and forth between quadrants. A player is eliminated when a ball is bounced in a player's quadrant and the player is unable to touch the ball into another player's quadrant. It is a popular game at elementary schools with little required equipment, almost no setup, and short rounds of play that can be ended at any time.
“Craigslist”, (2021-01-02):
Craigslist is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.
https:/
/ theodi.org/ article/ how-are-facebook-apple-and-microsoft-contributing-to-openstreetmap/ https:/
/ ai.facebook.com/ blog/ mapping-roads-through-deep-learning-and-weakly-supervised-training https:/
/ blog.mapillary.com/ news/ 2020/ 06/ 18/ Mapillary-joins-Facebook.html “IPhone”, (2021-01-02):
The iPhone is a line of smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. that use Apple's iOS mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007. Since then Apple has annually released new iPhone models and iOS updates. As of November 1, 2018, more than 2.2 billion iPhones had been sold.
“Illumina, Inc.”, (2020-12-22):
Illumina, Inc. is an American company. Incorporated in April 1998, Illumina develops, manufactures, and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. The company provides a line of products and services that serves the sequencing, genotyping and gene expression, and proteomics markets. Its headquarters are located in San Diego, California.
“23andMe”, (2021-01-02):
23andMe is a privately held personal genomics and biotechnology company based in Sunnyvale, California. It is best known for providing a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service in which customers provide a saliva sample that is laboratory analysed, using single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping, to generate reports relating to the customer's ancestry and genetic predispositions to health-related topics. The company's name is derived from the fact that there are 23 pairs of chromosomes in a normal human cell.
“BGI Group”, (2021-01-02):
BGI, currently known as the BGI Group, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, is a Chinese genome sequencing company, headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
“Complete Genomics”, (2020-12-22):
Complete Genomics is a life sciences company that has developed and commercialized a DNA sequencing platform for human genome sequencing and analysis. This solution combines the company’s proprietary human genome sequencing technology with its informatics and data management software to provide finished variant reports and assemblies at Complete Genomics’ own commercial genome center in Mountain View, California. In March 2013 Complete Genomics was acquired by BGI-Shenzhen, a genomics services company in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. After the acquisition Complete Genomics moved to San Jose, and in June 2018 become part of MGI, the instruments manufacturing business of BGI.
“23andMe”, (2021-01-02):
23andMe is a privately held personal genomics and biotechnology company based in Sunnyvale, California. It is best known for providing a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service in which customers provide a saliva sample that is laboratory analysed, using single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping, to generate reports relating to the customer's ancestry and genetic predispositions to health-related topics. The company's name is derived from the fact that there are 23 pairs of chromosomes in a normal human cell.
“Uber”, (2020-12-27):
Uber Technologies, Inc., commonly known as Uber, is an American company that offers vehicles for hire, food delivery, package delivery, couriers, freight transportation, and, through a partnership with Lime, electric bicycle and motorized scooter rental. The company is based in San Francisco and has operations in over 900 metropolitan areas worldwide. It is one of the largest providers in the gig economy and is also a pioneer in the development of self-driving cars.
“Lyft”, (2021-01-02):
Lyft, Inc. develops, markets, and operates a mobile app, offering vehicles for hire, motorized scooters, a bicycle-sharing system, and food delivery. The company is based in San Francisco, California and operates in 644 cities in the United States and 12 cities in Canada.
“Self-driving car”, (2021-01-02):
A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous vehicle (AV), driverless car, or robo-car is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and moving safely with little or no human input.
“Waymo”, (2021-01-02):
Waymo LLC is an American autonomous driving technology development company. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google. Waymo operates a commercial self-driving taxi service that operates in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area called "Waymo One", with Chandler, Arizona fully mapped. In October 2020, the company expanded the service to the public, and it is the only self-driving commercial service that operates without safety backup drivers in the vehicle. Waymo also is developing its driving technology for use in other vehicles, including delivery vans and Class 8 tractor-trailers for delivery and logistics.
“Cruise (autonomous vehicle)”, (2020-12-22):
Cruise LLC is an American self-driving car company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, Cruise tests and develops autonomous car technology.
https:/
/ www.wsj.com/ articles/ can-detroit-become-a-software-business-1540008107 “Crypton Future Media”, (2020-12-22):
Crypton Future Media, Inc., or Crypton, is a Japanese media company based in Sapporo, Japan. It develops, imports, and sells products for music, such as sound generator software, sampling CDs and DVDs, and sound effect and background music libraries. The company also provides services of online shopping, online community, and mobile content.
“Vocaloid”, (2020-12-28):
Vocaloid is a singing voice synthesizer software product. Its signal processing part was developed through a joint research project led by Kenmochi Hideki at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, in 2000 and was not originally intended to be a full commercial project. Backed by the Yamaha Corporation, it developed the software into the commercial product "Vocaloid" which was released in 2004.
“Hatsune Miku”, (2021-01-02):
Hatsune Miku, sometimes called Miku Hatsune, is a Vocaloid software voicebank developed by Crypton Future Media and its official moe anthropomorph, a 16-year-old girl with long, turquoise twintails. She uses Yamaha Corporation's Vocaloid 2, Vocaloid 3, and Vocaloid 4 singing synthesizing technologies. She also uses Crypton Future Media's Piapro Studio, a singing synthesizer VSTi Plugin. She was the second Vocaloid sold using the Vocaloid 2 engine and the first Japanese Vocaloid to use the Japanese version of the Vocaloid 2 engine. Her voice is modeled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita. Miku's personification has been marketed as a virtual idol and has performed at concerts onstage as an animated projection.
“Saki Fujita”, (2020-12-22):
Saki Fujita is a Japanese voice actress and narrator from Tokyo. She sang the ending theme to the anime Tokimeki Memorial Only Love, "Kiseki no Kakera", (奇跡のかけら) along with Yuki Makishima and Yukako Yoshikawa as well as the opening songs for Working!! – Someone Else, Coolish Walk, Now!!!Gamble with Kana Asumi and Eri Kitamura. She is best known for voicing Akagi in Kantai Collection and Yukari Kotozume/Cure Macaron in Kirakira PreCure a la Mode, as well as for sampling her voice for Crypton Future Media's Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku.
“Virtual YouTuber”, (2020-12-27):
A virtual YouTuber or VTuber is an online entertainer that uses a digital avatar generated using computer graphics. A growing trend that originated in Japan in the mid-2010s, a majority of VTubers are Japanese-speaking YouTubers or live streamers who use anime-inspired avatar designs. By 2020, there were more than 10,000 active VTubers.
“List of mergers and acquisitions by Facebook”, (2020-12-22):
Facebook, Inc. is a social networking company that has acquired 82 other companies, including WhatsApp. The WhatsApp acquisition closed at a steep $16 billion; more than $40 per user of the platform. Facebook also purchased the defunct company ConnectU in a court settlement and acquired intellectual property formerly held by rival Friendster. The majority of the companies acquired by Facebook are based in the United States, and in turn, a large percentage of these companies are based in or around the San Francisco Bay Area. Facebook has also made investments in LuckyCal and Wildfire Interactive.
“Instagram”, (2021-01-02):
Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and originally launched on iOS in October 2010. The Android version was released in April 2012, followed by a feature-limited desktop interface in November 2012, a Fire OS app in June 2014, and an app for Windows 10 in October 2016. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations and view trending content. Users can like photos and follow other users to add their content to a feed, a function that seems to be discontinued as of September 2020.
“WhatsApp”, (2021-01-02):
WhatsApp Messenger, or simply WhatsApp, is an American freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) service owned by Facebook, Inc. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices but is also accessible from desktop computers, as long as the user's mobile device remains connected to the Internet while they use the desktop app. The service requires users to provide a standard cellular mobile number for registering with the service. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app targeted at small business owners, called WhatsApp Business, to allow companies to communicate with customers who use the standard WhatsApp client.
“Expedia”, (2020-12-22):
Expedia.com is an online travel agency and metasearch engine owned by Expedia Group, an American online travel shopping company based in Seattle. The website and mobile app can be used to book airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruise ships, and vacation packages.
“Elasticsearch”, (2021-01-02):
Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java. Following an open-core business model, parts of the software are licensed under various open-source licenses, while other parts fall under the proprietary (source-available) Elastic License. Official clients are available in Java, .NET (C#), PHP, Python, Apache Groovy, Ruby and many other languages. According to the DB-Engines ranking, Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine followed by Apache Solr, also based on Lucene.
https:/
/ aws.amazon.com/ blogs/ opensource/ keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ “Amazon Web Services”, (2021-01-02):
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools. One of these services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS's version of virtual computers emulates most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).
“Kubernetes”, (2020-12-22):
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management.
“Docker (software)”, (2020-12-22):
Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels. All containers are run by a single operating system kernel and therefore use fewer resources than virtual machines.
https:/
/ www.nytimes.com/ 2019/ 12/ 15/ technology/ amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html “Imgur”, (2021-01-02):
Imgur is an American online image sharing community and image host founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009. The service has been popular with hosting viral images and memes, particularly those posted on Reddit.
“Reddit”, (2021-01-02):
Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website.
“Vevo”, (2020-12-22):
Vevo is an American multinational video hosting service founded on June 16, 2009, as a joint venture among three major record companies: Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and EMI. In August 2016, Warner Music Group (WMG), the world's third-largest record company, agreed to license premium videos from its artists to Vevo.
https:/
/ www.recode.net/ 2018/ 5/ 24/ 17390756/ vevo-youtube-video-apps-existential-threat “Hulu”, (2021-01-02):
Hulu is an American subscription video on demand service fully controlled and majority-owned by The Walt Disney Company, with NBCUniversal as an equity stakeholder.
“Darknet Market Archives (2013-2015)”, (2013-12-01):
Dark Net Markets (DNM) are online markets typically hosted as Tor hidden services providing escrow services between buyers & sellers transacting in Bitcoin or other cryptocoins, usually for drugs or other illegal/
regulated goods; the most famous DNM was Silk Road 1, which pioneered the business model in 2011. From 2013–2015, I scraped/
mirrored on a weekly or daily basis all existing English-language DNMs as part of my research into their usage, lifetimes/ characteristics , & legal riskiness; these scrapes covered vendor pages, feedback, images, etc. In addition, I made or obtained copies of as many other datasets & documents related to the DNMs as I could.This uniquely comprehensive collection is now publicly released as a 50GB (~1.6TB uncompressed) collection covering 89 DNMs & 37+ related forums, representing <4,438 mirrors, and is available for any research.
This page documents the download, contents, interpretation, and technical methods behind the scrapes.
“Darknet Market mortality risks”, (2013-10-30):
I compile a dataset of 87 public English-language darknet markets (DNMs) 2011–2016 in the vein of the famous Silk Road 1, recording their openings/
closing and relevant characteristics. A survival analysis indicates the markets follow a Type TODO lifespan, with a median life of TODO months. Risk factors include TODO. With the best model, I generate estimates for the currently-operating markets. http:/
/ www.colinsteele.org/ post/ 23103789647/ against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup “Roomkey”, (2020-12-22):
Roomkey, formerly Room Key, is a hotel metasearch engine. Roomkey is a joint venture founded by Choice Hotels International, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott International, and Wyndham Worldwide or their respective affiliates. There are over 45,000 hotels listed on Room Key, in 150 countries and including 60 brands.
https:/
/ www.wsj.com/ articles/ who-controls-diners-data-opentable-moves-to-assert-control-11552644121 “OpenTable”, (2021-01-02):
OpenTable is an online restaurant-reservation service company founded by Chuck Templeton on 2 July 1998 and is based in San Francisco, California.
“Seamless (company)”, (2021-01-02):
Seamless North America LLC is an online food ordering service that allows users to order food for delivery and takeout from restaurants through their web site or suite of mobile apps.
“Grubhub”, (2020-12-22):
Grubhub Inc. is an American online and mobile prepared food ordering and delivery platform that connects diners with local restaurants. The company is based in Chicago, Illinois and was founded in 2004. As of 2019, the company had 19.9 million active users and 115,000 associated restaurants across 3,200 cities and all 50 states in the United States. Grubhub Seamless went public in April 2014 and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol "GRUB".
“Uber Eats”, (2020-12-22):
Uber Eats is an American online food ordering and delivery platform launched by Uber in 2014 and based in San Francisco, California.
“DoorDash”, (2020-12-22):
DoorDash Inc. is an American food delivery service. It launched in Palo Alto, California in 2012. As of January 2020, it had the largest food delivery market share in the United States. DoorDash held its initial public offering on December 9, 2020.
https:/
/ www.nytimes.com/ 2018/ 06/ 23/ business/ slice-app-local-pizzerias.html “Slice (app)”, (2021-01-02):
Slice is an online food ordering platform for independent pizzerias. It allows pizzeria owners to offer their products to their customers using a mobile-optimized website and their customers can place orders through the Slice app and social media channels. The company claims their platform is used by 9,000 pizzerias in 2,500 towns and cities in the US. It also claims to have processed more than $100 million worth of deliveries in 2017 and to have filled a total of over 12 million orders since 2010.
“Y Combinator”, (2021-01-02):
Y Combinator (YC) is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over US$155 billion as of October 2019. The company's accelerator program is held in Mountain View, California.
“Hacker News”, (2021-01-02):
Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
“Tragedy of the anticommons”, (2020-12-27):
The tragedy of the anticommons is a type of coordination breakdown, in which a single resource has numerous rightsholders who prevent others from using it, frustrating what would be a socially desirable outcome. It is a mirror-image of the older concept of tragedy of the commons, in which numerous rights holders' combined use exceeds the capacity of a resource and depletes or destroys it. The "tragedy of the anticommons" covers a range of coordination failures including patent thickets, and submarine patents. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, but there are assorted means, including eminent domain, laches, patent pools, or other licensing organizations.
“Exit, Voice, and Loyalty”, (2021-01-02):
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) is a treatise written by Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012). The work hinges on a conceptual ultimatum that confronts consumers in the face of deteriorating quality of goods: either exit or voice. The book has been described as influential. The framework presented in the book has been applied to topics such as protest movements, migration, political parties, and interest groups, as well as to personal relationships.
“Zero to One”, (2021-01-02):
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a 2014 book by the American entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel co-written with Blake Masters. It is a condensed and updated version of a highly popular set of online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups, as taught by Thiel at Stanford University in Spring 2012.
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The enduring phenomenon of ‘holy wars’ in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, are not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are a coordination problem: dominant platforms enjoy strong network effects, such as reduced ‘bitrot’ as it is regularly used & maintained by many users, and can inflict a mirror-image ‘bitcreep’ on other platforms which gradually are neglected and begin to bitrot because of the dominant platform.
The outright negative effect of bitcreep mean that holdouts do not just cost early adopters the possible network effects, they also greatly reduce the value of a given thing, and may cause the early adopters to be actually worse off and more miserable on a daily basis. Given the extent to which holdouts have benefited from the community, holdout behavior is perceived as parasitic and immoral behavior by adopters, while holdouts in turn deny any moral obligation and resent the methods that adopters use to increase adoption (such as, in the absence of formal controls, informal ones like bullying).
Perhaps if we explicitly understand ‘holy wars’ as coordination problems, we can avoid the worst excesses and tap into knowledge about the topic to better manage things like language migrations. [Keywords: technology, sociology, Python]
“Kevin Kelly (editor)”, (2021-01-02):
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.
“The Wheel of Reincarnation”, (2002?):
Short technology essay based on Myer & Sutherland 1968 (!) discussing a perennial pattern in computing history dubbed the ‘Wheel of Reincarnation’ for how old approaches inevitably reincarnate as the exciting new thing: shifts between ‘local’ and ‘remote’ computing resources, which are exemplified by repeated cycles in graphical display technologies from dumb ‘terminals’ which display only raw pixels to smart devices which interpret more complicated inputs like text or vectors or programming languages (eg PostScript). These cycles are driven by cost, latency, architectural simplicity, and available computing power.
The Wheel of Reincarnation paradigm has played out for computers as well, in shifts from local terminals attached to mainframes to PCs to smartphones to ‘cloud computing’.
https:/
/ www.techdirt.com/ articles/ 20070503/ 012939/ grand-unified-theory-economics-free.shtml “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, (2016-06-08):
[Post-Heartbleed/Shellshock discussion of the economics of funding open source software: universally used & economically invaluable as a public good anyone can & does use, it is also essentially completely unfunded, leading to serious problems in long-term maintenance & improvement, exemplified by the Heartbleed bug—core cryptographic code run by almost every networked device on the planet could not fund more than a part-time developer.]
Our modern society—everything from hospitals to stock markets to newspapers to social media—runs on software. But take a closer look, and you’ll find that the tools we use to build software are buckling under demand…Nearly all software today relies on free, public code (called “open source” code), written and maintained by communities of developers and other talent. Much like roads or bridges, which anyone can walk or drive on, open source code can be used by anyone—from companies to individuals—to build software. This type of code makes up the digital infrastructure of our society today. Just like physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure needs regular upkeep and maintenance. In the United States, over half of government spending on transportation and water infrastructure goes just to maintenance.1 But financial support for digital infrastructure is much harder to come by. Currently, any financial support usually comes through sponsorships, direct or indirect, from software companies. Maintaining open source code used to be more manageable. Following the personal computer revolution of the early 1980s, most commercial software was proprietary, not shared. Software tools were built and used internally by companies, and their products were licensed to customers. Many companies felt that open source code was too nascent and unreliable for commercial use. In their view, software was meant to be charged for, not given away for free. Today, everybody uses open source code, including Fortune 500 companies, government, major software companies and startups. Sharing, rather than building proprietary code, turned out to be cheaper, easier, and more efficient.
This increased demand puts additional strain on those who maintain this infrastructure, yet because these communities are not highly visible, the rest of the world has been slow to notice. Most of us take opening a software application for granted, the way we take turning on the lights for granted. We don’t think about the human capital necessary to make that happen. In the face of unprecedented demand, the costs of not supporting our digital infrastructure are numerous. On the risk side, there are security breaches and interruptions in service, due to infrastructure maintainers not being able to provide adequate support. On the opportunity side, we need to maintain and improve these software tools in order to support today’s startup renaissance, which relies heavily on this infrastructure. Additionally, open source work builds developers’ portfolios and helps them get hired, but the talent pool is remarkably less diverse than in tech overall. Expanding the pool of contributors can positively affect who participates in the tech industry at large.
No individual company or organization is incentivized to address the problem alone, because open source code is a public good. In order to support our digital infrastructure, we must find ways to work together. Current examples of efforts to support digital infrastructure include the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative and Mozilla’s Open Source Support (MOSS) program, as well as numerous software companies in various capacities. Sustaining our digital infrastructure is a new topic for many, and the challenges are not well understood. In addition, infrastructure projects are distributed across many people and organizations, defying common governance models. Many infrastructure projects have no legal entity at all. Any support strategy needs to accept and work with the decentralized, community-centric qualities of open source code. Increasing awareness of the problem, making it easier for institutions to contribute time and money, expanding the pool of open source contributors, and developing best practices and policies across infrastructure projects will all go a long way in building a healthy and sustainable ecosystem.
https:/
/ blog.mozilla.org/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2018/ 05/ MZOTS_OS_Archetypes_report_ext_scr.pdf#page=2 https:/
/ www.amazon.com/ Information-Rules-Strategic-Network-Economy-ebook/ dp/ B004OC07FI/ “PriceSCAN”, (2020-12-22):
PriceSCAN.com was a US-based price comparison website, founded in 1997 by David Cost and Jeffrey Trester, alumni of the Wharton School. A privately held company based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, PriceSCAN was one of the first generation of "shopping bots" which included Dealtime, mySimon and BottomDollar.
“Skaff Elias”, (2020-12-22):
Skaff Elias is a game designer.
“Mind uploading”, (2021-01-03):
Mind uploading, also known as whole brain emulation (WBE), is the hypothetical futuristic process of scanning a physical structure of the brain accurately enough to create an emulation of the mental state and copying it to a computer in a digital form. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind.
“Moore's law”, (2021-01-02):
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production.
“Semiconductor fabrication plant”, (2020-12-22):
In the microelectronics industry, a semiconductor fabrication plant is a factory where devices such as integrated circuits are manufactured.
“Silk Road 1: Theory & Practice”, (2011-07-11):
The cypherpunk movement laid the ideological roots of Bitcoin and the online drug market Silk Road; balancing previous emphasis on cryptography, I emphasize the non-cryptographic market aspects of Silk Road which is rooted in cypherpunk economic reasoning, and give a fully detailed account of how a buyer might use market information to rationally buy, and finish by discussing strengths and weaknesses of Silk Road, and what future developments are predicted by cypherpunk ideas.
“Tor DNM-related arrests, 2011-2015”, (2012-07-14):
I compile a table and discussion of all known arrests and prosecutions related to English-language Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets (DNMs) such as Silk Road 1, primarily 2011–2015, along with discussion of how they came to be arrested.
“On the Design of Display Processors”, (1968-06):
The flexibility and power needed in the channel for a computer display are considered. To work efficiently, such a channel must have a sufficient number of instruction that it is best understood as a small processor rather than a powerful channel. As it was found that successive improvements to the display processor design lie on a circular path, by making improvements one can return to the original simple design plus one new general purpose computer for each trip around. The degree of physical separation between display and parent computer is a key factor in display processor design. [Keywords: display processor design, display system, computer graphics, graphic terminal, displays, graphics, display generator, display channel, display programming, graphical interaction, remote displays, Wheel of Reincarnation]
“Heartbleed”, (2020-12-27):
Heartbleed is a security bug in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. It was introduced into the software in 2012 and publicly disclosed in April 2014. Heartbleed may be exploited regardless of whether the vulnerable OpenSSL instance is running as a TLS server or client. It results from improper input validation in the implementation of the TLS heartbeat extension. Thus, the bug's name derives from heartbeat. The vulnerability is classified as a buffer over-read, a situation where more data can be read than should be allowed.
“Shellshock (software bug)”, (2020-12-27):
Shellshock, also known as Bashdoor, is a family of security bugs in the Unix Bash shell, the first of which was disclosed on 24 September 2014. Shellshock could enable an attacker to cause Bash to execute arbitrary commands and gain unauthorized access to many Internet-facing services, such as web servers, that use Bash to process requests.
It was republished in the 2004 anthology, Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity, but I only spotted minor formatting changes like removing some hyperlinks, so the 2002 blog post is the canonical version.↩︎
To quote David J. Bradley, who worked on the IBM PC team, “We had learned from the DataMaster development and from the experiences of others that even a company the size of IBM couldn’t develop all the hardware and software to make a personal computer a success. From the beginning, we decided to publish data concerning all the hardware and software interfaces. Anyone designing an adapter or a program to run on the IBM PC would get as much information as we had available.” The success of this strategy and the (unpatented, royalty-free) Industry Standard Architecture prompted IBM’s (failed) attempt to put the cat back in the bag with its Micro Channel architecture; as Maher describes it:
Unlike the original IBM bus architecture, MCA was locked up inside an ironclad cage of patents, making it legally uncloneable unless one could somehow negotiate a license to do so through IBM. The patents even extended to add-on cards and other peripherals that might be compatible with MCA, meaning that absolutely anyone who wanted to make a hardware add-on for an MCA machine would have to negotiate a license and pay for the privilege. The result should be not only a lucrative new revenue stream but also complete control of business computing’s further evolution. Yes, the clonesters would be able to survive for a few more years making machines using the older 16-bit bus architecture. In the longer term, however, as personal computing inevitably transitioned into a realm of 32 bits, they would survive purely at IBM’s whim, their fate predicated on IBM’s willingness to grant them a patent license for MCA and their own willingness to pay dearly for it.
Sun didn’t find a place, and the remains of Sun Microsystems were ultimately purchased by Oracle in 2009 –Editor.↩︎
Of course, this can pose a problem of its own: if the other layers of the stack have near-zero profits, how will they afford to develop new technology that the incumbent might desire? Apple, for example, apparently has to extend large loans and provide other life-support for hardware makers to get the new materials & manufacturing techniques it wants. This does not always end well, like in the case of the ultra-hard sapphire screens for the iPhone (TechCrunch; WSJ).↩︎
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Anyone who said that the 1990s prosecution of Microsoft didn’t accomplish anything—that it was companies like Google, rather than government lawyers, that humbled Microsoft—didn’t know what they were talking about, Reback said. In fact, he argued, the opposite was true: The antitrust attacks on Microsoft made all the difference. Condemning Microsoft as a monopoly is why Google exists today, he said.
Surprisingly, some people who worked at Microsoft in the 1990s and early 2000s agree with him. In the days when federal prosecutors were attacking Microsoft day and night, the company might have publicly brushed off the salvos, insiders say. But within the workplace, the attitude was totally different. As the government sued, Microsoft executives became so anxious and gun-shy that they essentially undermined their own monopoly out of terror they might be pilloried again. It wasn’t the consent decrees or court decisions that made the difference, according to multiple current and former Microsoft employees. It was “the constant scrutiny and being in the newspaper all the time,” said Gene Burrus, a former Microsoft lawyer. “People started second-guessing themselves. No one wanted to test the regulators anymore.”
In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory, but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials—the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored—be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by attorneys’ desks and describing new software features, and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman emperor. In the early 2000s, Microsoft’s top executives told some divisions that their plans would be proactively shared with competitors—literally describing what the company intended to create before software was even built—to make sure it wouldn’t offend anyone who was likely to sue. Microsoft’s engineers were outraged. But they went along with it. And most important, as Microsoft lived under government scrutiny, employees abandoned what had been nascent internal discussions about crushing a young, emerging competitor—Google. There had been informal conjectures about reprogramming Microsoft’s web browser, the popular Internet Explorer, so that anytime people typed in “Google,” they would be redirected to MSN Search, according to company insiders. Or, perhaps a warning message might pop up: “Did you know Google uses your data in ways you can’t control?”
Microsoft was so powerful, and Google so new, that the young search engine could have been killed off, some insiders at both companies believe. “But there was a new culture of compliance, and we didn’t want to get in trouble again, so nothing happened,” Burrus said. The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government’s antitrust lawsuit is one reason that Google was eventually able to break Microsoft’s monopoly. “If Microsoft hadn’t been sued, all of technology would be different today,” Reback told me.
“‘Crush Them’: An Oral History of the Lawsuit That Upended Silicon Valley”:
Jon Mittelhauser (NCSA Mosaic co-author/
Netscape co-founder): “The actual license for the Netscape browser was free for noncommercial use, but commercial companies had to pay. … We were actually bringing in a fair amount of browser revenue. Microsoft came along and just gave away the browser for free, for any use, for commercial use, noncommercial use, whatever. That undercut that whole business.” Harry First (antitrust bureau chief, New York Attorney General’s Office): “It wasn’t being free that was a bad thing. It was the end result of that being that Internet Explorer would be the exclusive browser and that no other competitor would arise as a competing operating system. … It was basically exclusionary behavior. It was an effort to smother Netscape in the cradle and cut off its air supply.”
Gary Reback (antitrust lawyer representing Netscape): “What Microsoft was doing was not just damaging to a company - namely Netscape - but it was damaging to a whole new generation of technology.”
…Mittelhauser: “What both Microsoft and Netscape missed out on was that realization that the browser didn’t really matter. It was sites that mattered. We easily could have bought Yahoo, Google, etc. But the Google guys and the Yahoo guys basically worked with us and we helped get them set up.”
Stephen Houck (antitrust bureau chief, New York Attorney General’s Office): “Some people say the decree caused Microsoft to lose its edge. I’m not really convinced that was the case. I think what it did do is make them very careful about using market power they had in Windows to affect related areas of software like the browser or search or operating systems for handheld devices.”
Steve Lohr (technology and economics reporter, The New York Times): “It helped provide an opening for Google, for sure. I remember doing this story when Google was upset because Microsoft was trying to hide the Google Search box. And then they fell away from that, they had to make it easier for the Google Search box to appear.”
Houck: “If there hadn’t been the lawsuit or hadn’t been the [consent] decree, based on their past behavior, Microsoft very well might have done things that made it a lot more difficult for Google. Even with desktop search, that was one of the areas we were looking at in terms of what Microsoft could and couldn’t do with Windows. Google was probably one of the beneficiaries.”
Reback: “Microsoft had run Netscape out of the browser market. Internet Explorer was literally 98% of the market. The only way you could get to Google was through Microsoft. You had to go onto the Microsoft browser and type www.google.com. Now if you did that, there’s no reason Microsoft had to send you to Google. They could have just put up the big red warning screen, saying ‘Don’t click on this site. It’s a bad site. It takes your personal information without telling you …’ I have long asserted, based on my conversations with Microsoft people, that they didn’t do it because they were tired of getting fined a billion euros a pop. It was clear what would happen to them if they killed Google or the next generation of technology. The reason they didn’t do that was the threat of antitrust enforcement. Because of antitrust enforcement, that’s why we have Google. There is no other reason.”
… Lawrence Lessig: “It’s interesting to think about the right to compete on the Microsoft platform and the right to compete on the Facebook or Google platform. Google and Facebook create innovation platforms, but they reserve the right perpetually to decide whether your application is allowed to run, and they can pull the plug anytime they want, and they do. With Microsoft running software on the operating system they provided, they never asserted the power to determine which programs were allowed to run or not. … Microsoft might have learned a lesson and behaved in a more open or respectful way with competitors, but the whole industry moved to a world where the platform owner has more power than the platform owner ever presumed to have in the days of Microsoft. That’s an important difference, which you might say undermines the significance of the case.”
Reback: “The thing about these technology industries is I can’t go back and fix things. If something anticompetitive happened in the airline industry, I could easily go back in and fix things and break things up. They’re still the same planes, they’re the same passengers, they’re the same gates, they’re the same air routes. They don’t change. That’s not the case with technology. Once a new technology is crushed, it’s gone. It’s not coming back - ever. We can’t do the same kind of fix easily. We’re at a situation with Google where I can’t go back and restore competition. If I’m going to make some competition, I’m going to have to do it by breaking the company apart, and that becomes all the more difficult.”
A curious not-quite example from computer gaming is offered by the rise and fall of StarCraft e-sports, caused in part by intellectual property right disputes.↩︎
WSJ:
Mukesh Ambani, head of Reliance Industries, one of India’s largest conglomerates, has shelled out $35 billion of the company’s money to blanket the South Asian nation with its first all-4G network. By offering free calls and data for pennies, the telecom latecomer has upended the industry, setting off a cheap internet tsunami that is opening the market of 1.3 billion people to global tech and retailing titans. The unknown factor: Can Reliance reap profits itself after unleashing a cutthroat price war? Analysts say the company’s ultimate plan, after connecting the masses, is to use the platform to sell content, financial services and advertising. It could also recoup its massive investment in the years to come by charging for high-speed broadband to consumers’ homes and connections for various businesses, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Archives of Grams listings are available.↩︎