I’d think employee productivity and retention would be high on the list.
Likewise as a recent founder myself the fact that I’ve been able to start a company with no office and have the flexibility to hire people from anywhere in the country is a game changer.
If big old fashion companies want to make people work in person, it’s basically just a gift for smaller competitors ready to eat their lunch.
I think you’re missing the point about antitrust and competition. It’s about abusing your power to prevent potential competitors from competing on the merits. Paying to be a default means hardly anybody will ever see your competitors product.
If everybody was able to easily see Google’s results vs competitors it’s likely they would try harder and wouldn’t have just spent all their effort on cramming more ads above the results.
It’s utterly uncontroversial to state that Google search has gone to shit in the last few years.
Now, the question to ask is if Google wasn’t paying off other companies to make them the default would they have been more incentivized to make a better search experience?
At this point I don’t get any better results from Google than DuckDuckGo/Bing. A few years ago Google was better, now they are increasingly useless and no better than competitors.
If iOS users got a prompt to choose a search engine the first time they open Safari, and the order of choices was random, how many would even notice the results were different in any way?
To be fair, with all the money the government wastes this taxpayer would be quite happy to have more resources devoted to this mixed probability/extremely high impact issue.
One of my favorite examples of the benefits of public interest spending and investment. There very likely wouldn’t be an ARM today if it weren’t for the Micro.
Eh, who knows really? Having something in the lab that works and getting a product team to understand how to make it useful to customers aren’t the same problem.
In some sense I’ve always thought Apple is focused so much on reliability and deterministic approaches that wrapping their heads around probabilistic outcomes is harder than for other companies.
I suspect most of that figure is in machine time, but otherwise they pay engineers a lot and Apple likewise occupies a non-trivial % of all the commercial real estate in Cupertino, employees security guards, other staff, etc.
So many people in leadership at top companies just won the start-up lottery as a junior employee and had the internal drive to get promo at all costs to gradually get to the top. As soon as they leave the bubble it’s clear how few real skills they possess.
Likewise, the degree to which Director+ jobs just hire based on current title at a competitor alone is bonkers. I’ve worked under people who are utterly clueless but managed to make VP at the place up the street. So they just get to be a VP at the next place.
I mean, they lost a good percentage of their top engineers a couple years back because leadership had a pretty serious communications issue with their employees. So not exactly surprised.