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What you see with the collapse of these companies is more concentration of market power, not less.
by jordanb 9y ago
What you see with the collapse of these companies is more concentration of market power, not less.
- WalterBright 9y agoPlease explain this with Kodak.
- jordanb 9y agoI know you're being coy picking the example from your list where the market leader wasn't simply forced out by an even bigger market leader. But in fact we have seen a lot of consolidation in the photographic industry. Back in the days of film everyone had to choose from a select few manufactures of chemical film. but people who created photography had a wide variety of equipment manufacturers to choose from, and those who did it professionally had a wide variety of sales channels into which to sell what they produced. Good photography was valuable and many thousands of people could support themselves as freelance photographers. Now we still have a decent set of SLR vendors. There's Nikon, Canon, Sony. Um, probably some Chinese manufacturers. The point and shoot market has been eclipsed by the camera phone, for which there are now exactly two platform providers. But the collapse in price of photographs also produced a collapse in value of photography. All those freelancers found their sales channels dry up. There wasn't Look or Life or Nat Geo or hundreds of other publishers who needed photographs and were willing to pay top dollar for excellent work. Instead photographers found themselves trying to sell the rights for pennies on a few photo agency platforms, or more likely surviving entirely on event work. The choke point at film manufacturing went away for sure, but we have a new choke point at the publishing and delivery end, and this choke point exerts vastly more control over the entire industry than the film duopoly ever did.
- WalterBright 9y agoI can take a photo, post it on reddit, and get instant worldwide distribution. So can anyone else. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/ There's a long list of such platforms anyone can upload pictures to. Or they can make their own websites. Anyone can do this. Sorry, I don't see any "choke point".
- dredmorbius 9y agoAttention itself is a choke point. How many such platforms can you name? How many such platforms would a typical member of the public be able to name? What is the distribution of traffic across such sites? (Hint: Zipf's Law applies.) Why is it that the information / comms world continuously, since at least the early 20th century, seems to settle on a single dominant provider, or at best, a handful of leading contenders within a field? Telegraph, telephones, television, computer equipment, computer languages, operating systems, social networks, "Web portals", etc., etc.
- Mz 9y agoBut, you don't make money that way. He is talking about selling photos, not giving them away.
- WalterBright 9y agoSeems to me that having so many people taking and publishing photographs driving the price to zero is the literal opposite of choke points and concentration of market power.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- llukas 9y agoRight now power shifted to publisher/distributor hands - and media market consolidating.
- Mz 9y agoCan you elaborate?
- AnthonyMouse 9y agoSuppose there are three large companies that dominate an industry. One of them fails. Now there are two large companies that dominate the industry.
- WalterBright 9y agoThe reason they usually collapse is because competitors appear.