It's healthy in that it causes unproductive firms to go bankrupt.

It's painful in that unproductive firms are no longer handing out free money to employees and customers.

Looking at the market of companies today, especially in the tech space, IMHO ten years or so of fiscal prudence would be really healthy.

The only downside is that Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft would weather it and come out more relatively dominant.

I agree, that’s probably what will happen. It’s the natural progression of things and the boom/bust credit cycle speeds the process- a new field of technology, full of hungry competitors, eventually winnows down to a small number of large firms, who then usually proceed to fix prices to ensure permanent profits. Then you have to get government involved to make sure they don’t abuse their monopoly power, and the whole thing ends up being a government/private industry hybrid operation. At that point it’s a power struggle between popular power/democracy and private power/capital, which lately capital has been dominating, but that may reverse.

Libertarian supporters of capitalism look backward to the earlier phase of a lot of competing small firms innovating rapidly, in which government is more an impediment than anything else, and while that’s a great time to be in, it’s just a phase, and eventually the board clears and you end up with a small number or just one large firm that controls a whole industry, and popular movements or government is really the only check on their power.

Looking backwards (90s/early 00s), it's curious we didn't see hyperscale cloud concentration earlier. The tech was there, at least relative to state of the art of the day.

I guess it was a demand problem.

There needed to be one huge customer to dictate a single set of needs, and that didn't exist until Amazon bootstrapped via its own demand and internal interoperability mandates.

It'll be curious if Google bows out. You'd think Android would have taught them that sometimes throwing money on a bonfire is a good investment in aggregate.

No disagreements there: I was just lamenting the short term negative impacts it will have.

Further concentration of capital’s power in the tech space is a significant issue, IMO, and painful in its own right to back out of. It will be interesting to see how we deal with this problem in the future… if we address it at all.