3 ms·
The tech industry is going to have to come to term that it's comprised of fundamentally winner-takes-all markets. The economies of scale the winner can get are
by Aissen 9y ago
The tech industry is going to have to come to term that it's comprised of fundamentally winner-takes-all markets. The economies of scale the winner can get are tremendous, while the spending efforts are relatively low for software. So it's basically a monopoly machine. The only way this is countered is that new markets keep being created, so that helps new entrants.
- ajross 9y ago> The economies of scale the winner can get are tremendous Once more, though: how do you take that frame and then explain the success of Instagram, which launched straight into the face of the unbreakable monopoly you posit?
- adventured 9y agoSnapchat had temporary success as well. So much for that. We never got to see what would have happened to Instagram, had Facebook gone on to compete with it over time with a cloned product (or perhaps some other purchased competitor that might have sprung up to take on Instagram). One of the most critical powers of a monopoly (with the typical profits that go with such), is its ability to acquire the smaller competition - frequently at high prices - that threatens it. Which is why Facebook was willing to pay such a seemingly immense sum for WhatsApp (a product with essentially zero sales). And it's why they would have happily paid a lot more for Instagram (another product with no sales) if they had demonstrated continued growth.
- ajross 9y agoWait... how can Google and Facebook both be monopolies in the same market? Again, you're saying that "big" competitors have advantages, which no one sane disagrees with. Nonetheless that's not what antitrust law is about, and whinging about "monopoly" as a synonym for "big" just leads to pointless arguments like this one.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Aissen 9y agoInstagram is a new, focused product. Essentially a new market. Also, I said that tech markets tend to reach (quickly) a monopoly situations. But even if it's very fast, it does not mean it's instant. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr were all created in the same 10-year time span.
- wang_li 9y agoIf this is to change then someone needs to develop a method to request content by content and not by provider. If links to videos specified a particular video you wanted to show rather than the video on a particular provider, then providers could compete to deliver the best service to a particular set of customers.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoYou mean magnet links?