I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history.
Pluralistic: Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform (23 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
Big Tech
Big Tech is a name given to the largest technology companies in the United States, which dominate consumer computing technology around the world. The individual companies change, but the interests and practices of these companies largely remain the same, and are at odds with many of the principles of permacomputing.
» Doing Windows, Part 8: The Outsiders The Digital Antiquarian
Microsoft Windows 3.0’s conquest of the personal-computer marketplace was bad news for a huge swath of the industry. On the software side, companies like Lotus and WordPerfect, only recently so influential that it was difficult to imagine a world that didn’t include them, would never regain the clout they had enjoyed during the 1980s, and would gradually fade away entirely. On the hardware side, it was true that plenty of makers of commodity PC clones were happier to work with a Microsoft who believed a rising tide lifted all their boats than against an IBM that was continually trying to put them out of business. But what of Big Blue themselves, still the biggest hardware maker of all, who were accustomed to dictating the direction of the industry rather than being dictated to by any mere maker of software? And what, for that matter, of Apple? Both Apple and IBM found themselves in the unaccustomed position of being the outsiders in this new Windows era of computing. Each must come to terms with Microsoft’s newfound but overwhelming power, even as each remained determined not to give up the heritage of innovation that had gotten them this far.
The most brilliant move in corporate history?
In a bold departure from its Big Tech peers, Apple sidestepped the $650 billion AI infrastructure spending frenzy, a move likened to opting out of purchasing the US Navy annually. While Amazon, Goo…
Is Big Tech's AI Gamble Starting to Look Riskier? - Slashdot
The Washington Post looks at giant tech companies "feeding every available dollar into the cash-incinerating maw of AI machines." They warn "Tech superstars that once had oodles of cash left over at the end of each year are now flipping into the red..." [While optimists expect] huge corporate p...
Computer Says Kill: The Toxic Love Triangle of Big Tech, Big War & Big Science w/ David Gray Widder
Academia, Big Tech, and the military are caught in a sordid love triangle — and their love language is money.
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Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do
A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.
Why Do the Biggest Companies Keep Getting Bigger? It’s How They Spend on Tech
The secret of success for Amazon, Google and Microsoft is how much they invest in their own technology.
Seize the Means of Computation - ProMarket
To regain internet autonomy from Big Tech companies, lower switching costs with legislation that allows new services to subvert network effects and encourage adversarial interoperability. Too often, our discussion of Big Tech’s dominance starts and ends with a simplistic account of network-effects-driven inevitability, as though the winner-take-all market we have today could not have been […]
Looking for the future of technology among the startup strivers
The new company men of Silicon Valley
Big Tech Pulled the Plug. They Downloaded Their Lovers.
How Chinese users created AI lovers, friends and family — and struggled to let them go
Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft come together to create the Partnership on AI | TechCrunch
The world's largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is
‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley
The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s
‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley
The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s
The idea of a "tech industry" has always relied on "computer" being a special kind of medium, akin to alchemy. And if tech demands to be king, AI hype has now elevated LLMs to a king of kings. But the solipsism has hit a dead end. The only way forward is to recognize that computers are not special.
LLMs are just normal technology. But tech is just a normal medium.
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