People used to quip that big tech companies keep pushing over engineered frameworks like React and Kubernetes to the public so that would-be competitors spend all their time configuring modules instead of actually making a product.
Imagine selling those would-be competitors a product that just actively makes their shit not work and sometimes deletes all their data.
People used to quip that big tech companies keep pushing over engineered frameworks like React and Kubernetes to the public
The real play here was to outsource training and maintainence costs while making highly compensated FAANG tech workers easier to replace. The end result was Facebook having a long line of applicants who are already familiar with React, instead of worrying about the internal training costs of replacing an employee. For this, the cost of “gifting” these frameworks to the public (and their competitors) pays dividends.
100%. And the reason for the AI push isn’t what I outline either (it’s just a capital-intensive project to justify tech companies staying as growth stocks instead of transitioning into dividend stocks and losing most of their valuation), even though it’s funny.
oh I hadn’t realized the effect of commoditizing complementary goods to drive down prices in the labor market (increase supply), but that’s deffo what Facebook did with react
kubernetes (and ollama) were a little different, more in line with what you usually think of with ‘commoditizing your complements’ - increasing demand (for container-first public cloud compute and generated slop hosting, respectively) by making complementary goods cheaper and more ubiquitous
People used to quip that big tech companies keep pushing over engineered frameworks like React and Kubernetes to the public so that would-be competitors spend all their time configuring modules instead of actually making a product.
Imagine selling those would-be competitors a product that just actively makes their shit not work and sometimes deletes all their data.
The real play here was to outsource training and maintainence costs while making highly compensated FAANG tech workers easier to replace. The end result was Facebook having a long line of applicants who are already familiar with React, instead of worrying about the internal training costs of replacing an employee. For this, the cost of “gifting” these frameworks to the public (and their competitors) pays dividends.
100%. And the reason for the AI push isn’t what I outline either (it’s just a capital-intensive project to justify tech companies staying as growth stocks instead of transitioning into dividend stocks and losing most of their valuation), even though it’s funny.
oh I hadn’t realized the effect of commoditizing complementary goods to drive down prices in the labor market (increase supply), but that’s deffo what Facebook did with react
kubernetes (and ollama) were a little different, more in line with what you usually think of with ‘commoditizing your complements’ - increasing demand (for container-first public cloud compute and generated slop hosting, respectively) by making complementary goods cheaper and more ubiquitous