On Tue, 24 Jun 1997, Tresy Kilbourne wrote:

> You, Steve Tomljenovic, wrote:
>
> >The only way big companies survive is that
> >they have three distinct advantages which soley comes from thier size.
> >They can afford the lawyers to defend thier ambigious patents, the
> >control the means of distribution, and they can afford to buy out
> >thier smaller competitors and assimilate thier technology (and
> >developers).
> Can you supply examples of the first two of these practices? Certainly
> the (blocked) Microsoft/Intuit deal is the most well-known among many of
> the last, and I'm not even sure what's wrong with it in the first place,
> outside of antitrust issues of course. The software developer evidently
> decides that selling will earn him/her more money than marketing it
> directly, otherwise the sale wouldn't take place. Am I missing something?

I admit I don't have a patent suit example at hand, but I think I can use
a somewhat similair case that is in the news now.  Digital is suing Intel
for patent infringement over micropressor design.  Fortunately,
Intel has deep enough coffers to fight out the suit in court.
However, a smaller business would most likely have to conceed
whether they were in the right or not.
As for means of distribution, I think we can draw a parrallel to the
publishing industry.  I don't see any real difference between software
publishing and book publishing.  It takes alot of resources to command
the retail outlets. (sorry, no example here..)

As to purchasing small companies, I never said anything was wrong with it
:).  I was just saying that's how larger businesses survive because they
can't produce the technology on their own.

>
> >In the computer industry at least, throwing more
> >money (and hence people) at a problem does not solve it.  The
> >beauracracy of a large oraganization stifles creative energies of
> >the engineers, which is the main efficiecy for technological production.
> Is this self-evidently true? I think of Xerox PARC, for example. I know
> it's chic to trash Microsoft, but I know that there are brilliant
> developers here who are paid to do nothing but brainstorm. How many small
> companies can afford to do that? More pertinently, do you know of any
> examples of great ideas being ignored by the big guys, then picked up and
> successfully developed by the small ones?

There is a distinction between pure research and the finer details of
actually implementing a technology.  I can come up with a great
idea, but the actual implementation is an art in itself and is,
well, alot of hard work.  A tight-nit team of engineers who have a vested
interest in the product they are creating (which is usually the case
in a smaller company) will outperform a larger corporation with
ten times as many people working on the same thing.

As for great ideas being ignored by the large companies, look at Apple
computer and the personal computer.  Or how about Netscape and the web
browser? These companies are large now, but they started out small.


> >
> >Personally, I see a great future for small business in the technology
> >sector, especially now that the Internet is removing the greatest
> >hurdle for a small technology business, distribution.
> I hope you're right. I always like it when reality confutes ideology, and
> the fact that software development is a relatively low-overhead
> enterprise does seem to deprive the behemoths of a lot of their built-in
> advantage in terms of economies of scale. From where I sit, however,
> there seems to be a basic divide between the killer apps, which
> increasingly require the resources of a large company to maintain their
> dominance, and the smaller, niche applications that can thrive quite
> comfortably via Internet distribution channels.

What is so great about software development is that cannot be
done effectively outside a group of 5-10 developers.  (Some might
go so far as to say only one or two).  The only reason that bigger
companies put huge teams of people on a project is that they
are afraid that the engineers who developed it will be able
to hold the company hostage because they are they only ones
who know anything about the software.


-------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Tomljenovic                    [log in to unmask]
Software Engineer
Neoglyphic Media Corp.               773-395-6247

          If you're a real programmer,
               code is your documentation
                 -- a well-known Be engineer