Re: TECH/NEWS: Net's Ugly Giants

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Thu, 28 Jan 1999 16:31:55 -0600

Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko wrote:
>
> Anybody has any ideas why large-scale boring and annoying services are
> taking over the Net business, and whether this process can ever reverse?

There's a constant stream of new companies coming up from below. They grow and become large. Once they stop growing, their senior executives try to satisfy their egos by acquiring other companies and building empires. The new conglomerate gets some nice headlines as "#1" for a while, then loses market share until it's back to the size of its component pieces. Repeat.

Well, if it was that way, it would be nicely symmetric. But even if it is, it's probably more true of oil companies than 'Net companies. Ask Robin Hanson.

-- 
        sentience@pobox.com         Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
         http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
          http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.