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Arrogance from a seller of a good or service alienates/pisses off their customers. SCENE: You walk into a large retail TV/tech/stereo store. There are monitors

Arrogance from a seller of a good or service alienates/pisses off their customers. SCENE: You walk into a large retail TV/tech/stereo store. There are monitors displaying ads. NOT in a ubiquitous way; in an annoying ubiquitous way (ie. every 5 feet you walk in the store aisles, a monitor drops from the ceiling and displays an ad and you get used to counting your steps and every 5 feet you have to duck around the ad-bearing monitor). You find a device online that disables the 'monitor drop' and bring it with you to that store. Staff notice this and tell you "either turn off your device or leave." What will you do? Phucking leave and never come back, that's what. What if Best Buy was the dominant seller of TV/tech/stereos and the only place to get the Best Buy experience? Monopolies don't last. Especially arrogant monopolies. It might take a while but if Best Buy was forcing people to view ads every time they visit the store -- and their customers started not showing up after being harassed by staff to 'stop using your monitor-drop blocker device' -- Best Buy would either 1) stop annoying their customers and find other ways to monetize 2) go out of business The thing that people may forget here is the arrogant belief of this particular monopolist (Zuckerberg et al). That belief is "we got them locked, they can't get this experience anywhere else, we're #1"). Well that's a mistake on their part. Can you imagine Jeff Bezos saying "effective immediately we're employing a FB ad model and stopping our users from ad-blocking -- I want more money." Bezos is 100% opposite Zuckerberg. - Bezos knows Amazon is the monopoly - and yet he still he busts his bauls to make the site as non-annoying as possible; read a case study of how much attention Jeff pays to no-friction interaction for users of the Amazon site Arrogant monopolists die. Zuckerberg needs to find a different way to monetize. The mere fact that the dummazz thinks so little of his users that he comes up with "we'll force them to consume ads" instead of a Bezos "make users as happy as possible" shows Zuckerberg is an azz. But then we all knew that because he stole the FB idea from someone else. NO FREAKING RESPECT. No respect extended from the guy -- so NONE GIVEN.

amateurpolymath 10y ago
> Monopolies don't last. This is simply untrue.
- youngButEager 10y ago
  No it's actually true, and everyone knew from the context I meant commerce monopolies in capitalist economies, such as Microsoft, IBM (in the early days of computers you apparently could get fired for writing a P.O. for a non-IBM machine), etc. Not talking about utilities. I meant commerce monopolies in a competitive market place, a monopoly that develops with 'network effects', 'switching costs', etc. Here's all it takes for a monopoly to fail: (switching costs become low enough) + (current monopoly has become a pain/overpriced/etc.) = get thee down satan and the monopoly is gone. Friendster, Myspace lost their market as we all know. SO WILL FACEBOOK. There is no 'secret sauce' there, just network effects, and minor switching costs of transferring/losing the data you've put on your FB account. Switching costs for desktop operating systems are dropping incrementally for obvious reasons. Lloyds of London has been around a long time but that doesn't mean they're a monopoly.

amateurpolymath 10y ago

> Monopolies don't last. This is simply untrue.

youngButEager 10y ago
No it's actually true, and everyone knew from the context I meant commerce monopolies in capitalist economies, such as Microsoft, IBM (in the early days of computers you apparently could get fired for writing a P.O. for a non-IBM machine), etc. Not talking about utilities. I meant commerce monopolies in a competitive market place, a monopoly that develops with 'network effects', 'switching costs', etc. Here's all it takes for a monopoly to fail: (switching costs become low enough) + (current monopoly has become a pain/overpriced/etc.) = get thee down satan and the monopoly is gone. Friendster, Myspace lost their market as we all know. SO WILL FACEBOOK. There is no 'secret sauce' there, just network effects, and minor switching costs of transferring/losing the data you've put on your FB account. Switching costs for desktop operating systems are dropping incrementally for obvious reasons. Lloyds of London has been around a long time but that doesn't mean they're a monopoly.