This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy.

These companies are generally large enough that they do not need the competitive aid of buying an existing company and starting with that sort of structural advantage.

E.g., did Nvidia not have enough money in their bank to start a company to compete with Hugging Face? This is a company that reportedly has ~200-300 employees with investment rounds totaling $400 million. Nvidia made $31.9 billion in net income last quarter.

I look at a company like Xiaomi which just developed its automotive division in-house without resorting to buying car companies. I think our traditional business and finance mindset has an overreliance on acquisitions.

This is a lesser-of-two-evils situation. Before acquisitions became the new "meta" in Silicon Valley, the old meta was that gigantic quasi-monopolies, like Microsoft, burn money and man-years embracing, extending, and extinguishing your product.

I heard (literally with my ears, during a pseudo-dinner-thing, so this may be apocryphal, so you may have to do some spelunking through sources) that Microsoft "bought" the source code of some browser-project, for a percentage of the revenues that come from Internet Explorer. The catch was that IE was bundled with Windows for free, so a percentage of zero is zero.

A definite fact, is that when Netscape folded, the industry -- and the investors that got burned by the rapaciousness of Microsoft -- finally got in-sync enough to lobby and agitate for the antitrust lawsuit that almost broke Microsoft up. A consequence of that lawsuit is that quasi-monopolies like Meta, Google, etc, started buying promising startups instead of burying them.

I am not sure that a world where Nvidia just out-spends Hugging Face, via its quasi-monopoly-revenues, is better than the one we are currently in.

If I have to choose between two evils, I'd obviously choose the lesser one. But maybe we can do even better, and choose the absence of evil?

Maybe companies should have "weight-classes" the same way that most sports have those, to match opponents. (After all, despite both being remarkable sportists, Koga cannot defeat Ogawa, who is a few weight-classes heavier). Something like this is how France protects (or tries to) its own small business owners (I am told, they still have many small independent bookstores, despite competition from Amazon, and chain-bookstores before that).

The venture-capital does _somewhat_ balance the scales, but not by much, and it encourages the pursuit of _exits_ instead of _excellence_ (not shaming anyone for taking an exit, I am just saying that the alternative is systematically penalized -- only the very lucky or very protected can pursue excellence).