“When Google bought YouTube, they could compete against the dominant player in video, which was the cable industry. When Amazon bought Whole Foods, they could compete against Kroger’s and Walmart. When Facebook bought WhatsApp, we could compete against telcos who used to charge 10 cents a text message, but not anymore.Now people can watch video, get groceries delivered, and send private messages for free. That’s competition. New companies are created all the time, all over the world. And history shows that if we don’t keep innovating, someone will replace every company here today.” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO
Zuckerberg defends tech
The leverageable factors within tech should not make tech firms look like bad eggs. Walmart has private labels and to make those calls, it possibly gets some people into a room to discuss options. That Amazon uses AI to make the decision should not make it an evil company. Nearly all the “bad” tricks we see in big techs happen in our traditional industries. The only difference is that digital technologies have weaponized the efficiency of execution exponentially. So, instead of Walmart understanding just 60% of why ABS Butter will do well as Walmart Butter private label, Amazon could get to 99% on why Amazon Butter will thrive. Focusing on outcomes alone will diminish innovation!
---
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.
Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 16 (Feb 10 – May 3, 2025) opens registrations; register today for early bird discounts.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and invest in Africa’s finest startups here.
When you visit those big organisations or institutions and a security man brings out a book where you enter your details, have you ever asked what they could do with the data supplied? The manifest you fill at bus terminals, have you wondered what else they could do with the data? We never bothered, because they are not tech companies!
Every single thing we now claim to worry about in the tech space has been going on for centuries, some corporations ran the world for decades. We never worried about how a food/drug company could supply foods or drugs to billions of people, what if it poisoned them all? Maybe we thought those samples we test were what saved humanity…
It’s about sentiment, just cast big tech companies in bad light, magically, their evil deeds and misdeeds become worse than dominant players of other eras. It’s still not possible to fire a shot over the web and kill people, but it happens everyday in the physical space, and we haven’t been able to stop that yet. Human is hypocrisy and hypocrisy is human.
What is clear is that the world is now disproportionately dominated by small minded people, and for them, anything big is a threat to their pitiful existence. Humans are specialists in self-destruction!