I used to be an L7 at Google, and a manager who set comp for my reports. I think that your sentence:
"The predominance of equity in these numbers means that when there’s a crash, all an employer has to do in order to slash comp is to fail to “refresh” the value of a worker’s stock grants to its pre-crash level." gives an incomplete picture of how bad the morale effect will likely be, and I need to get into the compensation mechanics weeds a bit to explain why.
For those unfamiliar with big tech company comp practices: typically you, an employee, get a comp letter each year after annual performance review, around about early December. The letter has three components. The first is your salary for the coming year, which typically applies a percentage raise to your salary for the current year, where the magnitude of that percentage is performance-based. The second is your bonus for the current year, which will be paid out the following January as a lump sum; the lump sum amount is based on your level and performance. And the third is an equity "refresh grant" amount, which is an annual new grant of restricted stock shares (they used to grant options but haven't for more than a decade now) that vests on a schedule. The vesting schedule is typically four years long, sometimes starting immediately with 1/48 of your grant vesting each month, sometimes starting with 1/4 of it vesting a year after the grant date and then 1/48 each subsequent month. The grants overlap and the overlapping vesting schedules serve as "golden handcuffs," in the sense that at any given point if you leave the company you are leaving on the table a bunch of shares that are granted but not vested. So the size of the grants are set based on expected future performance potential, i.e. how much the company cares about keeping you around for the next four years. If you really wanted a low performer to get the message that they were on the way out, you'd give them zero equity grant in their comp package.
Now, if the equity grant levels were set and reported to employees in terms of numbers of shares of stock per grant, and if the overlapping vesting schedule didn't make the cash flow trajectory so much more complicated, what you said would be completely correct. If your performance is flat, your new grant this year would be the same number of shares as last year, only those shares would now be worth much less than they were in your last grant, so the dollar value of your comp would go down without actually cutting any of the nominal parameters in your comp package. People would still notice, but it'd be much less obvious and obnoxious than a nominal salary cut.
And they did actually used to denominate equity grants in numbers of shares-- until the mid-2010s when the stocks started taking off at unpredictable but high rates of increase. Then the comp policies changed so that the equity grants were reported to employees *as a dollar value*, and the number of shares in the grant was chosen to be that much money worth of shares at some index date, say January 1 of the upcoming year. So as I remember and understand it, if your equity refresh grant value for a year was $250K, and GOOG happened to be worth $100 a share on January 1, you'd get 2500 shares in your grant.
This had two advantages in the mid-to-late 2010s. First, it gave employees a better sense of the expected present value of their total new compensation grant. Second, as long as the stock kept going up and up, the company could achieve the same nominal comp grant value with fewer and fewer shares.
But when the stock crashes, two things happen. First, the company has to *increase* the number of shares in comp grants or else cut their nominal value in a way that is obvious, easily measurable, and immediately morale-chilling to employees. Second, the value of previously granted shares that are now vesting goes down to less than the nominal value they were reported to have at grant time, so actual cash flow comp goes down *even if* forward-looking grant amounts are increased proportional to the stock price decline, and people who have been reckless enough to e.g. take out mortgages that are only payable if their total cash flow doesn't go down are in a bind. When we managers were planning comp we would get enough info about the values of people's prior grants to know if this was happening to them, because we knew it created a severe retention risk if you let someone's cash flow go down.
Now it's certainly possible that they won't even try to make employees whole for any of this. They could just say: look, we're in a recession, you can't go out and get a competitive offer from another company anytime you want the way you used to, therefore we don't have to avoid de facto comp cuts to keep you around, please understand how tough it is out there and be reasonable. That is definitely not what happened in 2008-09, the last time tech stocks went down a lot: back then they made us whole and then some. But revenue growth rates are not what they were in 2008-09 and the payroll is probably more bloated now than it was then too.
But one way or another, the choice is going to be between a large and very directly perceived comp cut and a major, major increase in shares per grant and thus in dilution rate. Caveat: the above description is several years old now; they may have changed some of the mechanics of this since I left, or I may be misremembering some detail about how the index pricing worked.
For Google in particular, the stock is down significantly from the beginning of the year, but it’s about even with the start of 2021 and still quite a bit higher than 2020 or 2019 (where the oldest grants would have been from). So the shares required for a given grant size will be about the same number as those given in 2021 - not close to dilution death spiral yet. (There are more employees than 2021, true.)
You can’t say the same for Facebook. They must have real problems with maintaining comp, because their stock has really tanked.
Layoffs are IMO more likely than major comp cuts at the AAGM (AAAM?) companies. You’d much rather have five $300k engineers than ten $150k-engineers-who-used-to-be-$300k-engineers. Because the latter aren’t going to be working very hard.
New hires are another matter - that’s where the price-setting really happens, and if the supply is up (layoffs) and demand is down, those prices will adjust. But Twitter is currently demonstrating the problem with assuming you can identify and remove “dead weight” without serious business impact.
When the dot.com boom went bust, a lot of tech info headed to the hinterlands, small towns, rural areas, secondary cities and suburbs. This helped spread out a lot of talent, that filled in a lot areas for the economy, all over the U.S. People came in and set about fixing up payments and taxes with programs run on computers, not adding machines. It made American business overall more productive, which was seen in the boom that followed the bust.
It is my expectation, that all of these recently let go or fired employees, will find new jobs, with different companies, doing different things, but that once again spread the knowledge and ability of what tech can do. Lower costs, and see that businesses become more profitable and exposed to new ideas, as least where they are concerned.
The future, despite this kerfuffle is still bright, put on some shades.
As a tech worker I really want to disagree with this post. That said I think you’re right, though I don’t think the next tech boom will take nearly as long as the post 2001 one to pick back up.
That said, a general criticism of your work (from a subscriber and a fan, to be clear): when you write these “why is X happening” stories, they wind up being “just so” stories where you list all the reasons that X is happening without doing much to weigh them in terms of importance or provide countervailing trends in the other direction. It makes it very hard to read critically and decide if I agree with you or not. For example, “how much time is left in the day” is not a strong explanation: people filled their time with 5hrs+ of linear TV long before the internet. Inventing a yet-more-entertaining form of entertainment will still be a powerful move for an ads business. Comparing that to, say, Moore’s Law slowing down in the list of things causing us to book-end this boom... I just don’t buy it.
Oh, I don't mean to say that no one will invent a better form of entertainment, just that saturation of daily time with entertainment means that this is now more of a zero-sum game. In fact this was already true, we just didn't call TV and news "tech" before Netflix and Twitter.
And sure, I often don't know the relative importance of factors. A lot of times that takes an empirical study to tease out, and the variables can be hard to define. A lot of things we see happening are over-determined; we can say they're happening, but we don't know exactly how much each factor contributes.
(Also note that from a mathematical perspective, it isn't even logically possible to decompose causes into percentage shares, because of interaction effects. You do see a lot of people talk this way, but really they've just assumed a linear model with no interaction terms.)
For what it’s worth, those kind of salaries - and, even more, the lower but still exceptionally high salaries for lower-level engineers working for the tech giants - always seemed ridiculous and a temporary phenomenon.
? They paid that much not out of class solidarity or the kindness of their hearts, but because that’s what it took to hire and retain people, and because they (generally correctly) anticipated that the employee would produce much more revenue than they cost. It’s like saying the price of oil at $110 is “ridiculous and temporary” because there’s plenty of oil (which there is). Temporary, sure, like all prices, but which direction it will move is hard to predict. (Not so hard today! But a year or two ago, more difficult.)
I have interviewed plenty of software engineer candidates at my tech giant employer, and talent is indeed pretty scarce even among the ones who made it past early screening. (Sometimes among the ones who get hired... but anyway.) As always, what matters is not the amount of something on the market, but the amount relative to demand.
That isn’t to say that a lot of people aren’t about to have a very bad time. Especially any who recently bought $2-3M houses in Sunnyvale or Mountain View with the idea in mind that they’d always be making $300-600k (often for both partners). We can pay our mortgage in the East Bay on one base salary and zero new stock grants - not that we want to, but we could.
But I also worked through both the dot-com crash and 2008, and the truth is that the thin times don’t last too long; salaries doubled and then doubled again in that period, and it’s not as if the world became less dependent on software or the center of gravity of the industry became less concentrated here. I don’t COUNT on another few booms, but they won’t surprise me.
Maybe. There's plenty of code being written at places other than Silicon Valley by people who don't work for the tech giants, who are being paid considerably less, and it's not all crap.
Not at all. But there is a reason those people aren’t working for the tech giants in SV. Usually the reason is that they don’t want to - either they don’t want to work for those companies, or any big company, or that they don’t want to live in SV (understandable) or even the broader Bay Area (I like it here, but it is very expensive and quite annoying).
Remote can help to some degree with the latter. But I quite understand the former sentiment. The work environment is not always fun, it is often ageist, sexist, hyper-competitive, poorly-managed, the work is sometimes pointless or done poorly, toxic dynamics can make any situation intolerable, and so on. I often have to remind myself of the Spaceballs line: we’re not just doing this for money. We’re doing this for a SHITLOAD of money. Because it can be very very annoying! People bail all the time!
Sometimes the answer is "elite recruiters using college prestige as a proxy for talent". I understand managers were busy with product before, but this downturn would be a good time to take a close look at talent pipelines.
My no-name-college degree and my $400k a year engineer friend with no degree at all - both at a large tech company you have definitely used today - argue otherwise.
I happy for you (really) but we've seen enough FAANG recruiters, managers, and VCs go viral for bragging about their prestige-bias screening methods to warrant a systemic investigation.
The big tech employers were colluding to try to keep salaries down by not poaching, until Facebook didn't play along - sometimes steep competition for labor is because industries lose control or monopsony power - granted, there was demand, but supply being tight was a policy change, competition change more than lack of supply compared to past years.
Also, big tech, developer hiring and VC has atrocious racism and sexism problem, which artificially reduce supply of labor. I get that SV has way more recent immigrants working in high end jobs and founders/CEOs than most traditional industries, and still feel SV really cuts out so many potential people due to deeply ingrained bias.
Employers willing to lean in on training pipeline of diverse workforce and serious efforts at worker protections to avoid hostile environments, will have long-term advantage in hiring and operations, always better when have collaboration and openness to diversity in employee perspective and experience. It's a bit like the corporate version of the advantages of democracy over authoritarianism in governments, more democratic and respectful and diverse workforces can seem to a stubborn, break-things leader as hindrance, and yet they can be the turtle businesses that win the race.
On the physical side, I believe whoever wins the "drones as a service" race will be quite huge, whether it's a startup like Skydio or an incumbent like DJI.
A large pacing factor for this isn't tech or even business but is rather regulatory. It is still very unclear how to manage airspace with more than a trivial number of drones from a technical perspective. More importantly, there hasn't been much real progress in how to regulate these drone flocks, including how to price acces like we price airwave bandwidth...
Good points. A lot to unlock even having automation within private and/or indoor spaces though. DJI, Skydio and others are beginning to tout docks or drones in a box that run automated missions.
" just like the internet cables laid during the dotcom boom" -- Weren't those fibres all laid down during the telco boom that blew up around 1999? I remember hearing that Google in particular had purchased parsecs of unused dark fibre around that time. They slowly lit the fibres, figured out how to encrypt all traffic between their data centers to protect it, and then turned the management and ownership of all that infrastructure over to lesser mortals during the 2010s. This gave a nice steady sideline source of revenue.
I agree with your optimistic Outlook in these last few posts, but only IF democracy prevails over autocracy.
And IF does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Perhaps not as heavy as I thought before the midterm results came in. I had resigned myself to relying on the Constitution to save our democracy but was wondering if Putin is correct and democracies are weak as we take the fruits of democracy for granted and complain about a moderate amount of inflation compared to the lack of anything to buy in autocracies like Russia, not to mention North Korea.
As Beaux of the fifth column predicted *before* the midterms, outcomes would be decided by people the polls did not take into account because they were labeled " not likely to vote" but young people who still have a future to worry about turned out to vote against the gop's disbelief in climate change or disinterest in interfering with the profits of the big donors and women who were labeled not likely to vote were still upset about Dobbs.
As I said in a previous post the more pressure there is on Trump the more unhinged he gets and after 2 years of his whining about 20/20, even some former voters of his are starting to realize that Trump has never cared about anything but Trump. I'm starting to think that the midterms came out just about right.
Without a large majority to just bulldoze their way to investigation after investigation and in enshrining forced birth in federal law and other Revenge politics the GOP will continue to show the voters that they have become a party only interested in retaining power and they will be arguing amongst themselves and McCarthy will get the job that he's always deserved:Speaker of A house divided, with just enough power to show the public again and again that Trump has continued his pattern of destroying everything that he's ever been involved in.
Meanwhile Ukraine continues to show the world that Putin had a potemkin military you spell only for helping Biden to rebuild NATO.
At the age of 80 I am once more optimistic that my Grands will have the opportunity to live in a world more like Denmark than North Korea, but we all have a lot of heavy lifting to do to make that come to pass.
The story here is really about Meta’s completely incompetent management in the last few years. Zuckerberg has a bad case of bored-founder syndrome, but rather than step aside and let someone else take care of shoveling in huge piles of cash and keeping Facebook functional, he lied to himself that his pet VR project was actually the next big thing, and the amount of money they’ve spent on it is so absurdly disproportionate to any prospect of return that he’s managed to do real harm to the company.
Facebook the product has been made unusable through repeated algorithm changes chasing revenue juicing. Of course all the tech companies do some of that, but FB managed to kill the golden goose, while failing to take on TikTok or YouRube effectively, even as Instagram exhausted its natural audience.
FB was so big that their pains have spread out over the industry, but I don’t think it had to be that way. It’s just Zuck is very, very incompetent as a CEO.
Most of the rest are small potatoes, and the other really big ones - Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, MS - are doing okay - not eating fat today, but not in any kind of trouble.
Could it also be a case of hubris? People think that because they're good at one thing they must be good at everything else. See Musk with Twitter, Zuckerberg with "metaverse", Google not being able to settle on a messaging app...
I keep thinking the next big tech things won't be so winner-take-all as say, MS, Apple, Google, Amazon. Even Amazon with huge advantages has decent competition in cloud.
Solar, wind, batteries, hydrogen, geothermal, seasonal energy storage, bio-manufacturing, EVs from cars to bikes to drones, vertical farms, vat-grown food, AI, and some health care innovations, all feel like they will be much more competitive and deflationary.
Of course some businesses will always find a way to dominate and somethings like consolidation of chip companies will likely happen but feels like we will be back to more normal, concentrated but still pretty competitive industries, with revenue stream from very tangible products at decent profits but not insane monopoly control of growth industry.
And yes, Apple needs to regulated far far more - feel like they are today's AT&T - don't think breaking them up will be very popular but reducing their insane cut off so many content producers and ad eyeballs and allowing insuring more competition would be very good.
I used to be an L7 at Google, and a manager who set comp for my reports. I think that your sentence:
"The predominance of equity in these numbers means that when there’s a crash, all an employer has to do in order to slash comp is to fail to “refresh” the value of a worker’s stock grants to its pre-crash level." gives an incomplete picture of how bad the morale effect will likely be, and I need to get into the compensation mechanics weeds a bit to explain why.
For those unfamiliar with big tech company comp practices: typically you, an employee, get a comp letter each year after annual performance review, around about early December. The letter has three components. The first is your salary for the coming year, which typically applies a percentage raise to your salary for the current year, where the magnitude of that percentage is performance-based. The second is your bonus for the current year, which will be paid out the following January as a lump sum; the lump sum amount is based on your level and performance. And the third is an equity "refresh grant" amount, which is an annual new grant of restricted stock shares (they used to grant options but haven't for more than a decade now) that vests on a schedule. The vesting schedule is typically four years long, sometimes starting immediately with 1/48 of your grant vesting each month, sometimes starting with 1/4 of it vesting a year after the grant date and then 1/48 each subsequent month. The grants overlap and the overlapping vesting schedules serve as "golden handcuffs," in the sense that at any given point if you leave the company you are leaving on the table a bunch of shares that are granted but not vested. So the size of the grants are set based on expected future performance potential, i.e. how much the company cares about keeping you around for the next four years. If you really wanted a low performer to get the message that they were on the way out, you'd give them zero equity grant in their comp package.
Now, if the equity grant levels were set and reported to employees in terms of numbers of shares of stock per grant, and if the overlapping vesting schedule didn't make the cash flow trajectory so much more complicated, what you said would be completely correct. If your performance is flat, your new grant this year would be the same number of shares as last year, only those shares would now be worth much less than they were in your last grant, so the dollar value of your comp would go down without actually cutting any of the nominal parameters in your comp package. People would still notice, but it'd be much less obvious and obnoxious than a nominal salary cut.
And they did actually used to denominate equity grants in numbers of shares-- until the mid-2010s when the stocks started taking off at unpredictable but high rates of increase. Then the comp policies changed so that the equity grants were reported to employees *as a dollar value*, and the number of shares in the grant was chosen to be that much money worth of shares at some index date, say January 1 of the upcoming year. So as I remember and understand it, if your equity refresh grant value for a year was $250K, and GOOG happened to be worth $100 a share on January 1, you'd get 2500 shares in your grant.
This had two advantages in the mid-to-late 2010s. First, it gave employees a better sense of the expected present value of their total new compensation grant. Second, as long as the stock kept going up and up, the company could achieve the same nominal comp grant value with fewer and fewer shares.
But when the stock crashes, two things happen. First, the company has to *increase* the number of shares in comp grants or else cut their nominal value in a way that is obvious, easily measurable, and immediately morale-chilling to employees. Second, the value of previously granted shares that are now vesting goes down to less than the nominal value they were reported to have at grant time, so actual cash flow comp goes down *even if* forward-looking grant amounts are increased proportional to the stock price decline, and people who have been reckless enough to e.g. take out mortgages that are only payable if their total cash flow doesn't go down are in a bind. When we managers were planning comp we would get enough info about the values of people's prior grants to know if this was happening to them, because we knew it created a severe retention risk if you let someone's cash flow go down.
Now it's certainly possible that they won't even try to make employees whole for any of this. They could just say: look, we're in a recession, you can't go out and get a competitive offer from another company anytime you want the way you used to, therefore we don't have to avoid de facto comp cuts to keep you around, please understand how tough it is out there and be reasonable. That is definitely not what happened in 2008-09, the last time tech stocks went down a lot: back then they made us whole and then some. But revenue growth rates are not what they were in 2008-09 and the payroll is probably more bloated now than it was then too.
But one way or another, the choice is going to be between a large and very directly perceived comp cut and a major, major increase in shares per grant and thus in dilution rate. Caveat: the above description is several years old now; they may have changed some of the mechanics of this since I left, or I may be misremembering some detail about how the index pricing worked.
Thanks!! That does give a more complete picture.
Added a link to this comment in the post!
For Google in particular, the stock is down significantly from the beginning of the year, but it’s about even with the start of 2021 and still quite a bit higher than 2020 or 2019 (where the oldest grants would have been from). So the shares required for a given grant size will be about the same number as those given in 2021 - not close to dilution death spiral yet. (There are more employees than 2021, true.)
You can’t say the same for Facebook. They must have real problems with maintaining comp, because their stock has really tanked.
Layoffs are IMO more likely than major comp cuts at the AAGM (AAAM?) companies. You’d much rather have five $300k engineers than ten $150k-engineers-who-used-to-be-$300k-engineers. Because the latter aren’t going to be working very hard.
New hires are another matter - that’s where the price-setting really happens, and if the supply is up (layoffs) and demand is down, those prices will adjust. But Twitter is currently demonstrating the problem with assuming you can identify and remove “dead weight” without serious business impact.
When the dot.com boom went bust, a lot of tech info headed to the hinterlands, small towns, rural areas, secondary cities and suburbs. This helped spread out a lot of talent, that filled in a lot areas for the economy, all over the U.S. People came in and set about fixing up payments and taxes with programs run on computers, not adding machines. It made American business overall more productive, which was seen in the boom that followed the bust.
It is my expectation, that all of these recently let go or fired employees, will find new jobs, with different companies, doing different things, but that once again spread the knowledge and ability of what tech can do. Lower costs, and see that businesses become more profitable and exposed to new ideas, as least where they are concerned.
The future, despite this kerfuffle is still bright, put on some shades.
As a tech worker I really want to disagree with this post. That said I think you’re right, though I don’t think the next tech boom will take nearly as long as the post 2001 one to pick back up.
That said, a general criticism of your work (from a subscriber and a fan, to be clear): when you write these “why is X happening” stories, they wind up being “just so” stories where you list all the reasons that X is happening without doing much to weigh them in terms of importance or provide countervailing trends in the other direction. It makes it very hard to read critically and decide if I agree with you or not. For example, “how much time is left in the day” is not a strong explanation: people filled their time with 5hrs+ of linear TV long before the internet. Inventing a yet-more-entertaining form of entertainment will still be a powerful move for an ads business. Comparing that to, say, Moore’s Law slowing down in the list of things causing us to book-end this boom... I just don’t buy it.
Oh, I don't mean to say that no one will invent a better form of entertainment, just that saturation of daily time with entertainment means that this is now more of a zero-sum game. In fact this was already true, we just didn't call TV and news "tech" before Netflix and Twitter.
And sure, I often don't know the relative importance of factors. A lot of times that takes an empirical study to tease out, and the variables can be hard to define. A lot of things we see happening are over-determined; we can say they're happening, but we don't know exactly how much each factor contributes.
(Also note that from a mathematical perspective, it isn't even logically possible to decompose causes into percentage shares, because of interaction effects. You do see a lot of people talk this way, but really they've just assumed a linear model with no interaction terms.)
For what it’s worth, those kind of salaries - and, even more, the lower but still exceptionally high salaries for lower-level engineers working for the tech giants - always seemed ridiculous and a temporary phenomenon.
Programming talent just isn’t that scarce.
? They paid that much not out of class solidarity or the kindness of their hearts, but because that’s what it took to hire and retain people, and because they (generally correctly) anticipated that the employee would produce much more revenue than they cost. It’s like saying the price of oil at $110 is “ridiculous and temporary” because there’s plenty of oil (which there is). Temporary, sure, like all prices, but which direction it will move is hard to predict. (Not so hard today! But a year or two ago, more difficult.)
I have interviewed plenty of software engineer candidates at my tech giant employer, and talent is indeed pretty scarce even among the ones who made it past early screening. (Sometimes among the ones who get hired... but anyway.) As always, what matters is not the amount of something on the market, but the amount relative to demand.
That isn’t to say that a lot of people aren’t about to have a very bad time. Especially any who recently bought $2-3M houses in Sunnyvale or Mountain View with the idea in mind that they’d always be making $300-600k (often for both partners). We can pay our mortgage in the East Bay on one base salary and zero new stock grants - not that we want to, but we could.
But I also worked through both the dot-com crash and 2008, and the truth is that the thin times don’t last too long; salaries doubled and then doubled again in that period, and it’s not as if the world became less dependent on software or the center of gravity of the industry became less concentrated here. I don’t COUNT on another few booms, but they won’t surprise me.
Maybe. There's plenty of code being written at places other than Silicon Valley by people who don't work for the tech giants, who are being paid considerably less, and it's not all crap.
Not at all. But there is a reason those people aren’t working for the tech giants in SV. Usually the reason is that they don’t want to - either they don’t want to work for those companies, or any big company, or that they don’t want to live in SV (understandable) or even the broader Bay Area (I like it here, but it is very expensive and quite annoying).
Remote can help to some degree with the latter. But I quite understand the former sentiment. The work environment is not always fun, it is often ageist, sexist, hyper-competitive, poorly-managed, the work is sometimes pointless or done poorly, toxic dynamics can make any situation intolerable, and so on. I often have to remind myself of the Spaceballs line: we’re not just doing this for money. We’re doing this for a SHITLOAD of money. Because it can be very very annoying! People bail all the time!
Sometimes the answer is "elite recruiters using college prestige as a proxy for talent". I understand managers were busy with product before, but this downturn would be a good time to take a close look at talent pipelines.
My no-name-college degree and my $400k a year engineer friend with no degree at all - both at a large tech company you have definitely used today - argue otherwise.
I happy for you (really) but we've seen enough FAANG recruiters, managers, and VCs go viral for bragging about their prestige-bias screening methods to warrant a systemic investigation.
The big tech employers were colluding to try to keep salaries down by not poaching, until Facebook didn't play along - sometimes steep competition for labor is because industries lose control or monopsony power - granted, there was demand, but supply being tight was a policy change, competition change more than lack of supply compared to past years.
Also, big tech, developer hiring and VC has atrocious racism and sexism problem, which artificially reduce supply of labor. I get that SV has way more recent immigrants working in high end jobs and founders/CEOs than most traditional industries, and still feel SV really cuts out so many potential people due to deeply ingrained bias.
Employers willing to lean in on training pipeline of diverse workforce and serious efforts at worker protections to avoid hostile environments, will have long-term advantage in hiring and operations, always better when have collaboration and openness to diversity in employee perspective and experience. It's a bit like the corporate version of the advantages of democracy over authoritarianism in governments, more democratic and respectful and diverse workforces can seem to a stubborn, break-things leader as hindrance, and yet they can be the turtle businesses that win the race.
On the physical side, I believe whoever wins the "drones as a service" race will be quite huge, whether it's a startup like Skydio or an incumbent like DJI.
A large pacing factor for this isn't tech or even business but is rather regulatory. It is still very unclear how to manage airspace with more than a trivial number of drones from a technical perspective. More importantly, there hasn't been much real progress in how to regulate these drone flocks, including how to price acces like we price airwave bandwidth...
Good points. A lot to unlock even having automation within private and/or indoor spaces though. DJI, Skydio and others are beginning to tout docks or drones in a box that run automated missions.
" just like the internet cables laid during the dotcom boom" -- Weren't those fibres all laid down during the telco boom that blew up around 1999? I remember hearing that Google in particular had purchased parsecs of unused dark fibre around that time. They slowly lit the fibres, figured out how to encrypt all traffic between their data centers to protect it, and then turned the management and ownership of all that infrastructure over to lesser mortals during the 2010s. This gave a nice steady sideline source of revenue.
I agree with your optimistic Outlook in these last few posts, but only IF democracy prevails over autocracy.
And IF does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Perhaps not as heavy as I thought before the midterm results came in. I had resigned myself to relying on the Constitution to save our democracy but was wondering if Putin is correct and democracies are weak as we take the fruits of democracy for granted and complain about a moderate amount of inflation compared to the lack of anything to buy in autocracies like Russia, not to mention North Korea.
As Beaux of the fifth column predicted *before* the midterms, outcomes would be decided by people the polls did not take into account because they were labeled " not likely to vote" but young people who still have a future to worry about turned out to vote against the gop's disbelief in climate change or disinterest in interfering with the profits of the big donors and women who were labeled not likely to vote were still upset about Dobbs.
As I said in a previous post the more pressure there is on Trump the more unhinged he gets and after 2 years of his whining about 20/20, even some former voters of his are starting to realize that Trump has never cared about anything but Trump. I'm starting to think that the midterms came out just about right.
Without a large majority to just bulldoze their way to investigation after investigation and in enshrining forced birth in federal law and other Revenge politics the GOP will continue to show the voters that they have become a party only interested in retaining power and they will be arguing amongst themselves and McCarthy will get the job that he's always deserved:Speaker of A house divided, with just enough power to show the public again and again that Trump has continued his pattern of destroying everything that he's ever been involved in.
Meanwhile Ukraine continues to show the world that Putin had a potemkin military you spell only for helping Biden to rebuild NATO.
At the age of 80 I am once more optimistic that my Grands will have the opportunity to live in a world more like Denmark than North Korea, but we all have a lot of heavy lifting to do to make that come to pass.
The story here is really about Meta’s completely incompetent management in the last few years. Zuckerberg has a bad case of bored-founder syndrome, but rather than step aside and let someone else take care of shoveling in huge piles of cash and keeping Facebook functional, he lied to himself that his pet VR project was actually the next big thing, and the amount of money they’ve spent on it is so absurdly disproportionate to any prospect of return that he’s managed to do real harm to the company.
Facebook the product has been made unusable through repeated algorithm changes chasing revenue juicing. Of course all the tech companies do some of that, but FB managed to kill the golden goose, while failing to take on TikTok or YouRube effectively, even as Instagram exhausted its natural audience.
FB was so big that their pains have spread out over the industry, but I don’t think it had to be that way. It’s just Zuck is very, very incompetent as a CEO.
Most of the rest are small potatoes, and the other really big ones - Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, MS - are doing okay - not eating fat today, but not in any kind of trouble.
YouRube is not wrong. :)
Could it also be a case of hubris? People think that because they're good at one thing they must be good at everything else. See Musk with Twitter, Zuckerberg with "metaverse", Google not being able to settle on a messaging app...
I keep thinking the next big tech things won't be so winner-take-all as say, MS, Apple, Google, Amazon. Even Amazon with huge advantages has decent competition in cloud.
Solar, wind, batteries, hydrogen, geothermal, seasonal energy storage, bio-manufacturing, EVs from cars to bikes to drones, vertical farms, vat-grown food, AI, and some health care innovations, all feel like they will be much more competitive and deflationary.
Of course some businesses will always find a way to dominate and somethings like consolidation of chip companies will likely happen but feels like we will be back to more normal, concentrated but still pretty competitive industries, with revenue stream from very tangible products at decent profits but not insane monopoly control of growth industry.
And yes, Apple needs to regulated far far more - feel like they are today's AT&T - don't think breaking them up will be very popular but reducing their insane cut off so many content producers and ad eyeballs and allowing insuring more competition would be very good.