
Bill Gates Noticed a Economy Trend No One Is Paying Attention To - devy
http://observer.com/2018/08/bill-gates-global-economy-trend-epiphany/
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ohiovr
All artifacts that are high technology become worthless within 20 years. If
you had invested 100,000 dollars into a video editing suite in 1994 the whole
thing would be worthless in 2004. Anyone wanna buy a 60K Sony BVW? Got one for
50 bucks on ebay shipping not included. EDIT Oops that was a a UVW not a BVW
deck still can't see why you would want to record anything. Just get the tapes
into the computer.

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throwaway82729
If you made $500,000 with the video editing suite in those 10 years, it was
probably worth it.

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ohiovr
500,000 - 100,000 / 10 = 40,000

But that doesn’t include salaries for professionals like editors or paintbox
artists. A lot of video companies in central Ohio could not cope and went out
of business at least temporarily. Mills James made it because they were poised
for maximum profitability instead of just economy.

Now if you just mean 500k profits well then it very well may be worth it :D

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40acres
Ben Thompson of Stratechery has written about this a lot. Software has a small
marginal cost and that's why Facebook can have over 2 billion users MAU, I
can't think of anything in the world except food and water that has over 2
billion monthly users. Even the largest non-software company could only dream
of that kind of reach.

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Jyaif
YKK( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YKK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YKK))
probably has billions of daily users.

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aisofteng
Bosch as well:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_GmbH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_GmbH)

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Ologn
I personally think is the most important economic trend in the world. As said,
it works for books and movies to.

A word I don't see in the article or tweetstorm is commodity, which is the
foundational unit of our economy. A commodity has the "old economy" property
Gates is talking about where the 10th car costs the same to manufacture as the
1000th. A created thing where virtually all the expense is in the initial
creation, after which duplication and distribution is virtually free, is no
longer a commodity. As our entire economic system, and social system, is based
in the end on the commodity as the base unit, this will have profound effects
as time goes on.

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hinkley
I don’t really buy this. I haven’t bought it since the dotcom boom. I’m pretty
sure Bill didn’t really buy this when he was CEO. If he did, then the people
he had in charge of ops didn’t.

In those days vertical scaling was a typical solution to the problem of too
many users. But the cost of exotic hardware goes up with power, so the cost of
a new batch of users is higher than the cost of previous batches. Even if you
managed horizontal scalability you ended up paying a kings ransom for
networking hardware to link them all together. And then there’s the databases.

These supposed economies of scale never really materialize. We spend a
significant fraction of our development budget on improving performance and
availability, learning or creating more sophisticated tools. None of that is
necessary once your project stagnates, which is why maintenance software is
attractive to enterprises.

These days we can get away with a lot more horizontal scalability, but most of
our algorithms scale logarithmically. Many are nlogn, we strive for mlogm
(where m is active users) but get stuck with mlogn often. But if you are
dependent on ad revenue you want to increase m so you get paid, so the
distinction matters less than it used to.

Each customer costs at least logarithmically more than the last. That means
your operating costs double when you sell 4 times as many copies. That’s not
nearly as expensive as running Tesla, but it’s not zero. If you’re in charge
of those strategy decisions and you aren’t aware of this, then you probably
won’t have that job for long.

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melling
That’s not what Bill said:

“Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend”

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Zanni
Yeah, this article is a clickbait rewrite that adds nothing of value to Bill's
original note. [0]

[0] [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Capitalism-Without-
Capital](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Capitalism-Without-Capital)

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hinkley
I feel like this policy of all HN Articles having to use the original article
title is working at cross purposes. You can’t remove the clickbait from the
title because that’s ‘editorializing’

As if we aren’t all reading the comments to see other people editorialize the
articles...

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downrightmike
This is econ 101, at least it was for me.

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ChainOfFools
I'm not an economics major, so forgive the possibly 'not even wrong' question:
but does anyone know if there is a term for the phenomenon that price, as
represented in currency, is really a lagging indicator of total value to the
market, as the market has yet to digest and sum over all of the intangible
value of a given 'something' into a single agreed-upon numerical metric that
can the used for trade?

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tCfD
How about EcMH - the "Eventually-consistent" Market Hypothesis

/s-orry Bogleheads, couldn't resist :D

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opticbit
You wouldn't download an update would you?

