I think that the difference is that when you compete based on hardware or software, eventually, through accretion, a free alternative can grow up if there are s

I think that the difference is that when you compete based on hardware or software, eventually, through accretion, a free alternative can grow up if there are sufficient people interested in the topic and prepared to work on it, and there's nothing inherent that means that what they create will be worse than what a large company would create. Most of these new services are built on data, and large, preexisting companies have huge advantages for the datasets that they can call on to train their systems. It's going to be very hard to escape the data problem for open source software. I'm also losing hope in some of this stuff, because everyone is obsessed with building products, when in fact the internet is more about protocols and standards for talking between hetrogenous systems. Chat is a depressing example of this.