Is it possible to be too rich? And if so, what does it mean?
Amazon has more than than 800 people working on what audio like videoconference gadgets on wheels, just it isn't sure that customers want them.
Apple tree has spent nearly a decade and untold billions of dollars starting, retreating from and repeatedly reworking a project to develop a car that may never striking the roads.
Google and Facebook continue to spend billions ownership and edifice fancy complexes when no one is confident almost the mail-pandemic needs of in-person office work.
We want successful companies to tinker with expensive projects, fifty-fifty if they don't pan out. Wandering and stumbling is how invention happens. Only that may not exist all that'southward happening in the inquiry labs and corporate suites of America's tech giants.
Role of what we may be seeing now are companies that are so friggin' rich that they sometimes throw coin around – hey, why not?! – in ways that hold back other companies and themselves from breakthrough innovations.
Aye, I'1000 really asking if it's possible to be likewise rich. (And yes, this is a trouble that I would like to have.)
Allow me explain why nosotros should care if a scattering of tech giants are wasting their time and money.
Not having enough money tin can strain a company or entrepreneur, but it can also foster focus and inventiveness. There's an axiom about technology startups that the ones founded in dire financial times often turn out to exist the biggest successes. Young companies and their leaders learn to practise more than with less and devote their attending to merely their best ideas.
And like a wealthy friend who installed gold toilets in each of his 25 bathrooms, having and then much money tin can hogtie companies to pursue half-baked ideas.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon is testing concepts for a department shop with digital article of clothing tags that customers can browse with their phones to try on items and may later on add together robots… for some reason. Tech doodads are probably non the way to improve the shopping experience for humans, merely Amazon can experiment with overly complicated concepts because hey, why not? It might work.
When Amazon throws money at a problem, other companies frequently respond with their own high-tech countermeasures. Not long later Amazon bought the Whole Foods supermarket chain, Kroger cooked up a plan for futuristic stores with digital shelves to alter product prices quickly and assistance people store more rapidly. Walmart and other stores deployed robots to find when items were out of stock and tested systems to automate the checkout process.
Some kinds of technology for retail, particularly automation of the parts that shoppers never see, may plough out to be major advances. But the trap that the retailers and Amazon fall into is a fixation on the flashy over the genuinely useful. Did anyone terminate to ask: Is a fussy digital touch on-screen or a robot the best way to do this? Walmart last year gave up on its shelf-scanning robots because simpler alternatives were just as good.
Amazon can try all this because information technology has seemingly endless coin. But what else could Amazon, Kroger or Walmart do that is more probable to better shopping rather than chasing expensive dreams of The Jetsons?
Many smaller tech companies also fear that tech giants are hoarding talent because they tin can. Imagine the midlevel software engineer making bank at Google who might otherwise showtime a driverless car company, or a Facebook director who might instead be steering a second-tier due east-commerce company to go the side by side Amazon.
The people who own America's engineering giants – stockholders – mostly trust Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft to follow the right routes to riches. (Sometimes stockholders practice worry that these companies are wasting coin, and it has resulted in executive changes or other visitor actions.)
We desire Big Tech to proceed investing to come upward with fresh products and services. But we all know that having then much money tin make people, and companies, undisciplined and impulsive.
Past Shira Ovide© 2022 The New York Times Company
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/experiences/it-possible-be-too-rich-285051
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