Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

[touchring]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

People won't even leave their iphones with their spouse and family, and yet companies can upload their data to a public cloud. Why? It might be because it's not your data, it's the company's data anyway. Who cares.

A black swan in the making. Sorry folks.

[Techdread]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Amazon’s profit machine is AWS.

The rest of the enterprise is a non profit until shareholders compel the profit switch to be switched from growth to profit.

Think about it logically.

Everyone strong cloud competitor of Amazon knows it’s profit is entirely AWS at the moment.

Who would cook the golden egg laying AWS goose?

I’m biased, but I’m likely not wrong.

You are not wrong, Cloud business is huge is THE growth market. It's like having local Electric generation or rely on companies that know what they doing.
Any small or medium sized company that thinks they can secure their's or customers data is living in cloud cuckoo land, sorry for the pun.

As for Sass it solves a lot of problems software companies customers have been screaming about for a long time, installing, keeping up to date, managing of licences, platforms (because the browser is the new operating system) etc.
I can understand why non businesses might have a problem especially older people and Americans whom like to own everything.

Microsoft has been making a lot of right moves lately they have produced the excellent VS Code a Chromium based text editor / IDE, and have gone all out on opensource buying up Github, defending Linux with patents and just opensourcing a lot of their software.

Goggle is Google they are a scientific incubator, who use ads to pay for their grandiose schemes, Steve Jobs called them the AI guys, I think they are the make an Oracle that can solve anything/everything guys.

The Tech sector has not even started yet, that sector with AI will change everything because the price of prediction is falling.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Probably just a minor worldview difference. But I doubt there's a single thing AWS hosts they aren't combing through and using to their advantage one way or another. One man's data misuse is another's 'no brainer. It's only reputation damaging if you get caught and can't obfuscate or blame employees and third parties or otherwise use your media properties to deflect. In my mind, this isn't tinfoil. It's not even controversial. It's just a fact of life. The powerful will take what they can, and the weak will accept what they must.

I worked for Amazon in the very early days, pre-AWS.

In fact, I recall unpacking a Sun SPARC server box over 20 years ago.

I spent a brief amount of time in Jeff’s old office, the 90’s photo of it has been circulating around the Net recently.

That doesn’t provide me any extraordinary insight into the company anymore, but I do firmly believe Jeff and his wife Mackenzie are good people from having met them back in the day.

You need to understand that Jeff is far more likely to commit a crime in defence of his customers, as opposed to crimes offending them. Customer obsession at Amazon is nothing short of ruthless.

For all of the company’s flaws, failing customers isn’t one of them.

I still know people in the company who are in quite senior positions today.

The ones I knew then, and the ones I know still working at the company now, wouldn’t tolerate such illicit behaviour alluded to.

Amazon’s profit machine is AWS.

The rest of the enterprise is a non profit until shareholders compel the profit switch to be switched from growth to profit.

Think about it logically.

Everyone strong cloud competitor of Amazon knows it’s profit is entirely AWS at the moment.

Who would cook the golden egg laying AWS goose?

I’m biased, but I’m likely not wrong.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Probably just a minor worldview difference. But I doubt there's a single thing AWS hosts they aren't combing through and using to their advantage one way or another. One man's data misuse is another's 'no brainer. It's only reputation damaging if you get caught and can't obfuscate or blame employees and third parties or otherwise use your media properties to deflect. In my mind, this isn't tinfoil. It's not even controversial. It's just a fact of life. The powerful will take what they can, and the weak will accept what they must.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Maybe cloud is here to stay. But even at the less secret local and state levels, they won't touch it. Damn courts and legislature won't even use executive branch servers. Trust issues. Anyone with IP or trade secrets of any value should think twice before giving Amazon or Google unfettered access to their data. For others, it might be convenient.

There’s so much more room for growth with cloud from federal government that local/state government are unnecessary at this stage.

But I would imagine US states will be looking to do cloud deals that have data centres located in their state perhaps as an offset for state/local government jobs lost from doing so.

Eventually those who run their own physical IT infrastructure will be looked at like those who still use the term “webmaster”.

There’s also enough competition in the cloud space, despite AWS’ vast lead, that any risk of data misuse would lead to horrific reputational damage and migration.

So a “Cloud Cold War” perhaps to maintain consistent and predictable behaviour from the major players, beyond localised/regionalised cyber threats.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

As long as wage inflation is considered bad while asset price inflation is considered good, they care about globalism at least in so much as it contributes to one or the other.

Here is a rather interesting speech given by Chinese General Qiao Liang about how the Dollar is used cyclically. I think it was from 1999 or 2000 or somewhere around then.

The Quiao Liang piece is interesting. But it seems to me to present things as novel that are actually quite old. I don't see the fed or the 70s or even the US or the dollar to be anyways unique in the weaponization of finance. Marcus Licinius Crassus knew the game well. Jefferson said "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies." Victoria used her financial empire to slaughter through famine more people than Mao or Stalin. The Irish were the test run for the big game in India. Hell, the whole damn Indian subcontinent was run by a joint stock corporation before the Raj.

I guess my point is that I take it as self-evident that the Breton Woods institutions and subsequent moves were made to establish and maintain the rule of the American Empire. And no doubt you may have a point that the Fed acts to push inflation out to foreign nations and keep it from taking root at home. And the dual mandate and standard inflation measures serve to prevent wage inflation or a seller's labor market in any way. So I'm not really disagreeing. Just pointing out that the Fed predates US Hegemony and largely isn't designed for the purposes of enforcing it. It might assist where it can, as would most US institutions. But there are several other agencies and institutions that serve that role much more directly.

Put another way, I really don't think the interest rate drops and hikes were proactive measures to cause the Asian flu in the late 90s as the general suggests. I really think they were reactive measures to domestic economic signals that had spillover effects. Maybe I'm a total rube and there are serious machinations afoot. But I tend to think nobody's playing a long con here and the Fed's generally much more myopic than that.

Hillary Clinton had that personal server which later created a big fiasco and the sense of impropriety. And while people should think twice before giving their trade secrets to Amazon or Google, most companies ultimately had no problem with cross-border supply chain dependencies in China. That is every bit as big of a risk as trusting Google & Amazon. After all, the Amazon employees which were selling competitive data were located in China.

Touche on that one. It's a risk I wouldn't personally want to take. But most may just be fine rolling the dice.

As to the mobile stuff, you also know that better than I. I have no doubt most of their money is now mobile and non-US. I just think they might be missing the lead edge of the wave. Doesn't mean they can't buy the wave out, though.

Some of the declines in efficiency are likely due to cell phones keeping people constantly distracted throughout their daily lives. In some countries like France retail employees are not allowed to use cell phones on the job. No social news feed with a limitless scroll of political outrage or promoting whatever "you are not good enough" mental hangup they have, no addictive mobile games, etc.


3D printing and re-onshoring manufacturing can drive a lot of innovation & create a lot of new markets.

This stuff all sounds mostly right to me. Except maybe the 3d printing. I was bigger on 3d printing until I did some about a decade ago. Kid next door got one in jr. high. Barely touched it after the first month. Nobody else does either. He's way into high school now. It gathers dust. Maybe we're just too early in development. But it seems more like a pricy novelty on one end and a niche technical prototyping tool on the other. Not quite something with mass appeal.

As various governments try to push back on the big tech monopolies that can also create a lot of carve out market opportunities for local players in many markets around the world.

I think this is possible, but it'll take a political earthquake the likes of which few are predicting to make it happen. Still, these occur with greater frequency than most people like to admit.

[seobook]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Anyways, I really don't think the fed cares to much about globalism, except when it comes to interest rates, dollar supply or treasury auctions. I'm sure there's some office somewhere working with the IMF. But it's more USDoC and the USTR who deal with global trade and the WTO and all of that sort of stuff. And Trump is their boss.

As long as wage inflation is considered bad while asset price inflation is considered good, they care about globalism at least in so much as it contributes to one or the other.

Here is a rather interesting speech given by Chinese General Qiao Liang about how the Dollar is used cyclically. I think it was from 1999 or 2000 or somewhere around then.

Maybe cloud is here to stay. But even at the less secret local and state levels, they won't touch it. Damn courts and legislature won't even use executive branch servers. Trust issues. Anyone with IP or trade secrets of any value should think twice before giving Amazon or Google unfettered access to their data. For others, it might be convenient.

Hillary Clinton had that personal server which later created a big fiasco and the sense of impropriety. And while people should think twice before giving their trade secrets to Amazon or Google, most companies ultimately had no problem with cross-border supply chain dependencies in China. That is every bit as big of a risk as trusting Google & Amazon. After all, the Amazon employees which were selling competitive data were located in China.

Facebook's brilliance I always thought was more to do with the rollout than the platform. Walled off, hard to get in, elite kids first, then .edus, so upper quintile or two. It was millennial catnip. Perfect for a rigid highly unequal class society like the USA in the 2000s. Start with Ivy League kids, work down to college kids, and soon almost everyone 'cool' is on it and everyone else wants in. Gen Z, or whatever the hell post-millennials are called, isn't as interested in what a bunch of 35 year olds did in 2005. Plus they were brought up with smartphones and mms messaging and whatnot. They can keep track of everyone and send out messages to groups just fine without facebook.

Absolutely agree with the roll out strategy being a key driver for them which prevented them from having the sort of MySpace bling view too early in a way that led them to doom.

They sort of lucked into the whole mobile stuff. They rolled out the IPO (May 18, 2012) when they were monetizing desktop & were totally unsure about how to monetize mobile / if their ads program would work / would users tolerate a lot of ads directly in the news feed, etc.

Rumors of Facebook's intent to eventually monetize mobile only really started appearing in December of 2011.

Part of the post-IPO swoon for Facebook was the belief they couldn't monetize mobile usage. The screen space is too small. The ads would be too distracting. etc.

And they had a series of blunders there. They made a phone nobody wanted. Zuckerberg was stuck on making everything HTML5 rather than building native apps.

Turns out they could monetize mobile quite well. That is what turned their stock up.

"One of the big complaints at the company's IPO was that it doesn't make any money on mobile, and that was true and fair at the time," said Jason Stein, founder and president of the social media agency Laundry Service.

Facebook had zero revenue on its mobile-ad platform when it went public but posted $375 million on mobile in the first quarter, Stein said.

Mobile generates about 92% of their ad revenues & that is with them having an ad blocker blocker which helps them monetize desktop users.

The book Chaos Monkeys mentions them building an ad exchange, how so many forms of "big data" for ad targeting had really little impact on moving the needle in terms of CPM, etc. ... and then what really moved the needle was ultimately monetizing mobile with ads in the news feed.

Still, there were and are people who are investing in this stuff thinking it has a big bright future of exponential growth. I see the last decade as a significant slowdown in actual real production/growth in the field. So they turned to financial engineering and they cranked their stock prices to the moon. But that's it. Feels to me like the digital age is winding down. ... There's no more limit pushing. For decades it was about moore's law and faster processors, bigger storage, more ram, etc. Now it's about repackaging low powered crap to sucker you into a monthly subscription and spy on you. Eventually there will be some efficiency gains or whatever. But nobody's pushing limits anymore. This is it. Maybe 65gflops becomes the new 65mph or whatever. This is good enough.

Some of the declines in efficiency are likely due to cell phones keeping people constantly distracted throughout their daily lives. In some countries like France retail employees are not allowed to use cell phones on the job. No social news feed with a limitless scroll of political outrage or promoting whatever "you are not good enough" mental hangup they have, no addictive mobile games, etc.

Computers are as much of a part of our lives as motors now, and they're not going to get much better. Innovation has already nearly ground to a halt. We're gonna need a new frontier. And hobbyists will have to be able to get in on it like they did with motors and computers, or it's not gonna take off.

3D printing and re-onshoring manufacturing can drive a lot of innovation & create a lot of new markets.

As various governments try to push back on the big tech monopolies that can also create a lot of carve out market opportunities for local players in many markets around the world.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

I would disagree on the cloud computing bubble.

In fact, I would go so far as to say cloud computing is the #1 driver of innovation in computing/data services.

What once required owning/managing your own physical IT infrastructure now only requires an AWS/Azure/etc account.

While I agree that security breaches have always been and likely will continue to be a major issue, security and access control is pretty serious stuff due to what's at stake.

Data centre security has become missile silo serious.

For me personally, I'm biased towards the cloud so I can stop paying for most of my IT hardware.

What I'm thinking will be an area of growth will be hybrid cloud solutions that include more localisation. Multiple concentric rings, even for small businesses using cloud services.

But a culture of security for everyone will be an increasing responsibility that will likely require a few big scares to embed in most people.

I've witnessed at least 1 Fortune 500 company that got hit with ransomware now taking security as serious as a heart attack.

But cloud is here to stay.

The best indicator of it is intelligence/defence services now shifting to it.

Amazon's split HQ2 being in proximity to DC(Government/Defence/Intelligence) was an absolute given as AWS is now running approved secure cloud.

Maybe cloud is here to stay. But even at the less secret local and state levels, they won't touch it. Damn courts and legislature won't even use executive branch servers. Trust issues. Anyone with IP or trade secrets of any value should think twice before giving Amazon or Google unfettered access to their data. For others, it might be convenient.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Another bubble is cloud computing. I think it's a disaster waiting to happen if there's a major sabotage from the inside.

I would disagree on the cloud computing bubble.

In fact, I would go so far as to say cloud computing is the #1 driver of innovation in computing/data services.

What once required owning/managing your own physical IT infrastructure now only requires an AWS/Azure/etc account.

While I agree that security breaches have always been and likely will continue to be a major issue, security and access control is pretty serious stuff due to what's at stake.

Data centre security has become missile silo serious.

For me personally, I'm biased towards the cloud so I can stop paying for most of my IT hardware.

What I'm thinking will be an area of growth will be hybrid cloud solutions that include more localisation. Multiple concentric rings, even for small businesses using cloud services.

But a culture of security for everyone will be an increasing responsibility that will likely require a few big scares to embed in most people.

I've witnessed at least 1 Fortune 500 company that got hit with ransomware now taking security as serious as a heart attack.

But cloud is here to stay.

The best indicator of it is intelligence/defence services now shifting to it.

Amazon's split HQ2 being in proximity to DC(Government/Defence/Intelligence) was an absolute given as AWS is now running approved secure cloud.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Somewhere in between. The fed has like 20,000 employees or something like that. Not huge, but not just a few folks in a board room either. They're doing a lot more than most people realize. In Boston, they're the big building right across from South Station. They do policy work too, and not just at the federal level. Experts in state policy and law are in each one. In a way, it's a really federated local system. What I mean by that is that at Boston they have experts in New Hampshire, just like in Minneapolis, they have experts in North Dakota's government, history and law, etc.



Anyways, I really don't think the fed cares to much about globalism, except when it comes to interest rates, dollar supply or treasury auctions. I'm sure there's some office somewhere working with the IMF. But it's more USDoC and the USTR who deal with global trade and the WTO and all of that sort of stuff. And Trump is their boss.

[davidstvz]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Put another way, Paul Ryan would have assembled a nearly identical bill regardless of whether Donald Trump or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush sat in the White House.

That's a useful way of thinking about it... it wasn't really Trump's tax cut. That being said, how else are you supposed to cut taxes when the rates are already skewed to the high end? If taxes are an unnecessary evil and only the wealthy are taxed, then righting that wrong can always be denigrated as "tax cuts for the wealthy". If you support smaller government, lower taxes for people richer than you is good because lower taxes for anyone is generally good. It means the government (which is wasteful and oppressive) needs to tighten its belt a bit.

Anyway, I feel like we've lost the thread of what I was originally asking. Is it accurate to consider the Fed supportive of "globalism" and Trump as against it (even if only just enough to raise the ire of people who are for it)? If so, might the Fed act against Trump (assuming it has the power to do so)?

I really don't know much about the Fed. Is it just a few guys in a boardroom setting the discount rate and the funds rate, or is it a giant organization with 100's of 1000's of employees doing little things I'm not aware of?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

Microsoft announced they were dumping their own proprietary web rendering engine to use Chromium, the open source project that drives Google Chrome development.

Between that, Google's dominance on mobile via Android & the cash they shower on Apple to be the default search provider on Safari (along with deals for other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) it is hard to see them losing share in search or with their web browser (at least outside of Russia where they lost share in both due to antitrust action).

Mozilla's CEO complained about Microsoft folding their rendering engine in Edge in favor of a rebuild based on Chromium, but Mozilla also terminated their search agreement with Yahoo in favor of a deal with Google. Yahoo also has a search agreement with Google in addition to their agreement with Bing. Sometimes when looking at the MSN new tab page I see ads which upon scroll over are delivered by Google AdSense.

I know with the rise of voice search many believe there will be fewer areas for ads, but perhaps the commercial recommendations become affiliate ads of some sort. Or advertisers can sponsor answers (this answer is brought to you by ___, check out their blah blah blah).

In some cases people also really want to be able to see what they are buying & compare in a visual format, and voice is not anywhere near as good as viewing through a web browser or perhaps some sort of AR headset in the future.

Social habits may be fickle, but Facebook has been resilient far longer than Friendster or MySpace or such were. And the new waves of regulation actually gut many upstarts with the combination of expensive compliance costs on one hand & lower ad rates on the other hand from the lack of data that both Google & Facebook have on end users.


If the easy things are all done, this will eventually lead to outsized profits for companies which are tech-enabled & not debt-levered thus having the ability to fund deeper integration on more expensive models requiring owning more of the supply chain, while private equity digs mass graves for their traditional legacy counterparts.


In some ways SaaS can better align incentives, but whenever there is lock-in (real or perceived) there is often incentives to sunset support for older versions, offer newer versions at higher prices, or increase prices via salespeople when one of the alleged subscription benefits was locking in price.


Absolutely agree with that last bit. Fashion is a market with no cap & 4 seasons of buying every year. There are even fashion rental services optimized for Instagram vanity.

One thing that has improved a lot on cell phones over the years is the cameras in them. That's decimated the point & shoot camera market.

I think the bifrucation from pre-2008 to post-2008 is because some of the tech companies felt the market impacts firsthand & perhaps gave talk about supporting the open web, but in reality moved to more of an AOL 1.0 model.

Thus there are now more propriety formats & standards to publish in - Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, Apple News, etc. Those ultimately increase the chunk size of competition while shutting out many smaller players who cannot afford all the additional tech cruft.

It is hard to find a big consumer-facing tech company that isn't investing aggressively (billions/yr) in video content. Amazon fast followed Netflix. Apple, Facebook & Google/YouTube are also investing heavily.

And some of the older legacy media companies have went through rapid consolidation. Newspapers, magazines, TV channels, film studios, etc. Disney bought Fox, AT&T bought WarnerMedia.


I was thinking of the healthcare system while reading that whole passage...then you ended with it.

I think you're probably right. I went out of my damned way to put lineage on my phone. It's fine. But not easy to install. Not ready for primetime. And I'm a weird case. I don't think they're all gonna die. Google's obviously not going extinct. It basically is search. And you know the ad revenue model better than I, they seem to have basically a duopoly on that with facebook for the time being. I know local small biz owners whose only ad spending is adwords. Google's gonna be tough to break without Teddy Roosevelt. But they're still crapping all over their brand. Was a time when maybe the privacy invasion was a reasonable tradeoff for most people who thought about it. Now they want monthly fees too. Their products are all getting worse, more invasive, and more expensive. People don't buy the don't be evil stuff any more. Only the true believers and clueless think of them as the forefront of a brilliant new future now, most stuff you read about them is how they're an evil monopoly. 10 years ago, the opposite was largely true. And they're taking flack from everyone from communists to Tucker Carlson, with Tom Friedman in between. It's clear across the spectrum.

Facebook's probably taking even more flack. And almost no kids I know under 20 or 25 or so use facebook. The company still has them because of instagram and other properties. But the facebook platform itself is their idea of a nightmare. Everyone's weird uncle screaming about politics and creeping on young girls. Facebook's brilliance I always thought was more to do with the rollout than the platform. Walled off, hard to get in, elite kids first, then .edus, so upper quintile or two. It was millennial catnip. Perfect for a rigid highly unequal class society like the USA in the 2000s. Start with Ivy League kids, work down to college kids, and soon almost everyone 'cool' is on it and everyone else wants in. Gen Z, or whatever the hell post-millennials are called, isn't as interested in what a bunch of 35 year olds did in 2005. Plus they were brought up with smartphones and mms messaging and whatnot. They can keep track of everyone and send out messages to groups just fine without facebook.

But AOL 1.0 is exactly what it feels like. They've built newer sandboxes with glass walls. And they're all investing in the same things. Dark and brooding soap operatic grand fantasy drama production and cruise control for steering wheels and siri/cortana/alexa/etc. Funniest thing about the spy-speakers and portals is that somehow, even though I know some pretty big tech geeks, I don't know anyone under 40 with one of those things. But I know lots of people around 50 or 60 who went right out and bought them. We'll see how it all plays out. But I think if it works at all like the past, it's gonna be college age kids who lead the revolt, and they're not gonna do it with regulations, they're just gonna never adopt a lot of this stuff in the first place. There's nothing less cool than what was cool 10-15 years ago.

Still, there were and are people who are investing in this stuff thinking it has a big bright future of exponential growth. I see the last decade as a significant slowdown in actual real production/growth in the field. So they turned to financial engineering and they cranked their stock prices to the moon. But that's it. Feels to me like the digital age is winding down. The mechanical age/age of speed probably peaked in what? 1973 with the human speed record? The last time we sent a man to the moon? Since then we've made basically no progress. Sure, some efficiency gains around the edges. But the limit-pushing ended at interstates and apollo. Thankfully, a digital/information age picked up where that left off. And we've come a long way from Commodore 64 and Intellivision. But this last decade just feels like it's all grinding to a halt. There's no more limit pushing. For decades it was about moore's law and faster processors, bigger storage, more ram, etc. Now it's about repackaging low powered crap to sucker you into a monthly subscription and spy on you. Eventually there will be some efficiency gains or whatever. But nobody's pushing limits anymore. This is it. Maybe 65gflops becomes the new 65mph or whatever. This is good enough.

Anyways, that's where my head's at about it. Computers are as much of a part of our lives as motors now, and they're not going to get much better. Innovation has already nearly ground to a halt. We're gonna need a new frontier. And hobbyists will have to be able to get in on it like they did with motors and computers, or it's not gonna take off. Maybe it'll be energy or materials. Maybe something else I'm not considering. And the big tech companies aren't going to die. They already own a bajillion subsidiaries. They'll just become boring massive conglomerates like anything else. Especially once their "wiz kid" CEOs finally age out or get kicked out and retire and they're managed by some boring Wharton MBA or whatever. They'll end up licensing the google name to a chinese search engine or some nonsense like GE did.

[seobook]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

There are literally trillions locked up in nothing. All it would take is typing a different URL into the bar en masse, and half of it goes kablooey. It's a whole lot bet on a bad habit that's a whole lot less fulfilling than smoking and a whole lot easier to kick.

Microsoft announced they were dumping their own proprietary web rendering engine to use Chromium, the open source project that drives Google Chrome development.

Between that, Google's dominance on mobile via Android & the cash they shower on Apple to be the default search provider on Safari (along with deals for other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) it is hard to see them losing share in search or with their web browser (at least outside of Russia where they lost share in both due to antitrust action).

Mozilla's CEO complained about Microsoft folding their rendering engine in Edge in favor of a rebuild based on Chromium, but Mozilla also terminated their search agreement with Yahoo in favor of a deal with Google. Yahoo also has a search agreement with Google in addition to their agreement with Bing. Sometimes when looking at the MSN new tab page I see ads which upon scroll over are delivered by Google AdSense.

I know with the rise of voice search many believe there will be fewer areas for ads, but perhaps the commercial recommendations become affiliate ads of some sort. Or advertisers can sponsor answers (this answer is brought to you by ___, check out their blah blah blah).

In some cases people also really want to be able to see what they are buying & compare in a visual format, and voice is not anywhere near as good as viewing through a web browser or perhaps some sort of AR headset in the future.

Social habits may be fickle, but Facebook has been resilient far longer than Friendster or MySpace or such were. And the new waves of regulation actually gut many upstarts with the combination of expensive compliance costs on one hand & lower ad rates on the other hand from the lack of data that both Google & Facebook have on end users.

FWIW, vt, I see lots of problems with tech across the spectrum. The easy things people want are all gone.

If the easy things are all done, this will eventually lead to outsized profits for companies which are tech-enabled & not debt-levered thus having the ability to fund deeper integration on more expensive models requiring owning more of the supply chain, while private equity digs mass graves for their traditional legacy counterparts.

Nearly the entire sector has shifted to scams like SaaS and lobbying to violate laws and regulations with impunity and other sorts of chicanery. Everything wants to be a subscription service. Everything wants to be price-variable with downloadable content. All the products arrive broken to be patched later (for money) because of it. Neighbors swore off new video game consoles for the kids because of it. They want credit card numbers and monthly fees on top of buying the console and the games just to play the games now. You can't just buy a game anymore, half the time. And more and more tech is like that. Monthly subscriptions or annual, auto-renewing, going up without telling you, doing nefarious things without telling you, or burying it in fine print. Customers absolutely hate their guts, and only tolerate it due to oligopoly. Apologies like this more or less unique one 5 years ago have become common today.

In some ways SaaS can better align incentives, but whenever there is lock-in (real or perceived) there is often incentives to sunset support for older versions, offer newer versions at higher prices, or increase prices via salespeople when one of the alleged subscription benefits was locking in price.

10 years ago the industry had all the good will in the world and actually seemed like it was helping. Now it just seems like a bunch of scams and brutal power grabs. Innovation gave way to disruption. Nobody in the tech sector is looking to make new, creative things people want that solve real problems. They're only looking for a way to disrupt@scale, no matter how many people they have to hurt, and no matter how many laws they have to break. It's a craven money grab at this point. Compare a 1998 PC to a 2008 PC and they're worlds apart. A 2008 PC keeps up just fine with a 2018 PC. You can say things have shifted to mobile, and maybe, but the new ones don't really do much more that the iPhone did a decade ago. They track you better. But they don't provide more or better services. The cell networks have gotten faster. I guess that's something. But overall, when I look at digital tech this last decade, I'm amazed at how little innovation there has been and how advancement has slowed to a meaningless crawl doing stupid useless things nobody ever wanted or asked for like putting a wifi chip in your stove, or worse, doing malicious criminal things.

I think there's one niche where you might see continued unabated growth, and thats in luxury goods. Regular people got no time for this nonsense, though. Worse, they got no money for it either.

Absolutely agree with that last bit. Fashion is a market with no cap & 4 seasons of buying every year. There are even fashion rental services optimized for Instagram vanity.

One thing that has improved a lot on cell phones over the years is the cameras in them. That's decimated the point & shoot camera market.

I think the bifrucation from pre-2008 to post-2008 is because some of the tech companies felt the market impacts firsthand & perhaps gave talk about supporting the open web, but in reality moved to more of an AOL 1.0 model.

Thus there are now more propriety formats & standards to publish in - Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, Apple News, etc. Those ultimately increase the chunk size of competition while shutting out many smaller players who cannot afford all the additional tech cruft.

It is hard to find a big consumer-facing tech company that isn't investing aggressively (billions/yr) in video content. Amazon fast followed Netflix. Apple, Facebook & Google/YouTube are also investing heavily.

And some of the older legacy media companies have went through rapid consolidation. Newspapers, magazines, TV channels, film studios, etc. Disney bought Fox, AT&T bought WarnerMedia.

I mean, if you imagine other "non tech" industries try disruption, it's obviously ridiculous. Yet because it's software and you can't look them in the face (or punch them), they get away with it. But the business model is ridiculously exploitive. The only thing worse is healthcare.

I was thinking of the healthcare system while reading that whole passage...then you ended with it.

[touchring]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

I think there's going to be regulations. Taxes on digital media and goods. Digital companies will be expected to pay dividends just like regular companies.

[metalman]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

I agree to an extent. But the software industry / tech has made a special farce of it.

Imagine if you went to buy a loaf of bread at the supermarket, and they said, "No, we don't sell bread by the loaf, we use a bread as a service (BaaS) model." So you ask, "What does that mean?" And they inform you that they've "partnered" (colluded) with all the markets and bakeries in a 50 miles radius to offer $30 monthly subscriptions that "allow you" to take 5 loaves of bread per month from any market or bakery in their "network."

At this point, you think, "Well, I only really use 2 loaves per month. But screw it, I came here for some bread, and I can't buy a single loaf easily, so why not. Screw it. I'll sign up."

So you go to sign up, and they hand you the contact. Dozens of pages of fine print, but they hurry you along to the signature. You take a quick look and notice it's an autorecurring subscription. But you figured they'd screw you like that.

Then, after you sign and pay, you find out they're sending a store clerk over to rifle through your underwear drawer, bug your phones, and put a tracking device on your car. You ask why the hell they'd do that, and they just say, "you agreed to it in your contract." You don't remember that, but there was so much fine print, maybe.

So you say, "screw this, this deal's getting worse all the time, I want out!" And they reply, "Fuck you, what are you gonna do? Stop eating sandwiches? Hahahaha!" Then they brag about their CEO's billions and their new luxury cars and great benefits and playful work environment and free busses that only they can use.

I mean, if you imagine other "non tech" industries try disruption, it's obviously ridiculous. Yet because it's software and you can't look them in the face (or punch them), they get away with it. But the business model is ridiculously exploitive. The only thing worse is healthcare.

ok... with ya. the fire boys turning everything into fee based & scraping a fee off of it. did it with edu & health care & tv. why not bread & butter?

respect your opinion... 'Nobody in the tech sector is looking to make new, creative things people want that solve real problems.'

your take on ej's project? solve a real problem? in his critique of the vr industry he claims virzoom does but the vr games don't...

read the wefunder page & see the biz model is just as you say... recurring fees... to gyms & such vs . same thing? ironic if virzoom is like all these tech plays going after the 'monthly payment consumer'. thinking out loud here...