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Honestly, I'd consider five entrenched players with frequent ups and downs to be the signs of a fairly competitive industry. Indeed, each of the five seems to o
by akanet 11y ago
Honestly, I'd consider five entrenched players with frequent ups and downs to be the signs of a fairly competitive industry. Indeed, each of the five seems to offer roughly comparable products to at least two of the other four players, suggesting that consumers are getting a pretty good deal out of all this.
- johansch 11y agoIt's a bunch of different industries though. Social: owned by Facebook. Search: owned by Google Advertisement: owned by Google. Mobile platforms: owned by Apple and Google. Actual competition here. No wonder things have been moving quickly. Shopping: owned by Amazon. Cloud computing: owned by Amazon. Google and Microsoft are trying to break in, so there's competition and progress.
- collyw 11y agoFacebook's revenue is through ads though.
- icebraining 11y agoFacebook is itself sustained by advertising, so how can Google own it?
- johansch 11y agoGoogle's revenues are 4x larger than Facebook's. But sure, Facebook are probably getting there some time.
- scholia 11y agoIn the previous generation of competition, the industry structure changed from vertical (IBM, DEC, Wang etc) to horizontal (Microsoft, Intel, Cisco etc). The new generation of competition is between ecosystems. These are both horizontal and vertical.
- walterbell 11y agoWould you view Intel/ARM, open-source software, network/telecom protocols and standardized connectors as horizontal components of these ecosystems?
- scholia 11y agoYes. In the horizontal industry organization, products ran across brands, or across different stacks. So, MS DOS and Windows ran on IBM, DEC, Compaq and many other PCs. Competition was between Microsoft and IBM etc (OS), Intel vs AMD, WD vs Seagate, OSI vs SNA vs TCP/IP etc. These battles usually ended up with one big winner, as you would expect from power laws. Things don't have to be open source to be de facto standards, just openly licensed, eg Windows. The use of proprietary connectors is a common feature of vertically integrated stacks. As I used to say, Apple is just DEC by other means. Modern ecosystems are different from the old vertical stacks because (among other things) they're cross platform. For example, Microsoft has dozens of apps on Android and iOS.
- AndrewUnmuted 11y agoNot to mention -- each of the five players are entrenched because they all solved much huger problems for consumers. As a result, they now have the ability to tackle new problems, whose own industry titans are woefully inept at fixing themselves. Video in particular is a problem that the content creators, nor the video technology manufacturers, seem to have any interest in fixing, and it is frankly an industry ripe with idiotic flaws, infighting, and stagnation. I am quite happy that all of the listed companies are finally looking to help tackle problems such as those faced in the digital video realm.