Cory Doctorow

There's some good empirical work on this from Maria Mazzucato and Tim O'Reilly, where they calculate that the first result on an Amazon search engine results page on average is 17% more expensive than the best match for your search.

So that's what you're seeing is basically the Amazon top choice is the worst choice.

But doesn't do anything with it internally until there's a competitor that threatens them.

Yeah, I think when you look at these companies and their acquisitions, what you see is that these companies very quickly suffer from what both Brandeis and Tim called the curse of bigness.

that they find it very hard to bring an actual product to market that they invent in-house.

When you look at Google, they've had like one really successful consumer-facing product launch, and that was in the previous millennium.

And almost everything they made in this millennium failed.

It either didn't launch, or after it launched, they shut it down.

Whereas their giant successes, their video stack, their ad tech stack,

documents, collaboration, maps, navigation, server management, mobile, right?

These are companies they acquired from someone else and operationalized.

And I'm an ex-ops guy.

I'm a recovering sysadmin.

So I'm not going to say that that's nothing.

It is a skill unto itself, the careful work to make things work and make them resilient and scale them.

But the idea that that has to happen under one roof

I think is a false binary.

I mean, one of the things Google did, arguably far more efficiently than they hired innovators, is they hired operations people.

And those are the people who really do the yeoman service at Google because the innovators, the product managers, never get to launch.

They only get to buy other people's products and refine them.