This is very well put. I've worked in tech for both startups and corporations. I've moved around a lot and I've come to the same conclusion.
The effects of tech monopolies are particularly obvious to those who work in open source.
For example, it's extremely common to find that some very expensive third-party services have free open source alternatives available - These open source communities are often struggling to stay alive. Big tech corporations hire thousands of engineers in-house and so it would cost them nothing extra to use the open source solution (they already have the engineering capacity to implement and manage it). But they won't! They will happily pay millions of dollars of fees annually to get something that they could have gotten for free and maybe paid an optional $20K per year 'tech support' fee to the open source community. Not only that, but their system would be way more flexible because the corporation would have full control over the open source code and their own data. For example, the $400 million that Facebook spent on acquiring Giphy could have been saved if they had used an open source solution instead. Heck, they could have built Giphy themselves from the ground up in a couple of months using open source solutions for very little additional engineering cost.
Corporations have no incentives to be efficient; instead they will use some expensive provider because the CEOs of both companies are friends. They have a monopoly so they can afford to be very wasteful.
The effects of tech monopolies are particularly obvious to those who work in open source.
For example, it's extremely common to find that some very expensive third-party services have free open source alternatives available - These open source communities are often struggling to stay alive. Big tech corporations hire thousands of engineers in-house and so it would cost them nothing extra to use the open source solution (they already have the engineering capacity to implement and manage it). But they won't! They will happily pay millions of dollars of fees annually to get something that they could have gotten for free and maybe paid an optional $20K per year 'tech support' fee to the open source community. Not only that, but their system would be way more flexible because the corporation would have full control over the open source code and their own data. For example, the $400 million that Facebook spent on acquiring Giphy could have been saved if they had used an open source solution instead. Heck, they could have built Giphy themselves from the ground up in a couple of months using open source solutions for very little additional engineering cost.
Corporations have no incentives to be efficient; instead they will use some expensive provider because the CEOs of both companies are friends. They have a monopoly so they can afford to be very wasteful.
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