4 ms·

How does it help the company in question? In the scenario, you propose Facebook mail is selflessly helping to fend off antitrust regulators off Gmail.

emodendroket 9y ago
It's not selfless; it's mutually beneficial. Someone looks at the existence of Facebook's core platform, Google+, GMail, and Facebook Mail, and concludes that nothing is amiss, since the bigger products have well-funded competition.
scrooched_moose 9y ago
Google pretends to have shopping [1] to shield Amazon, Amazon pretends to have social media [2] to shield Facebook, Facebook pretended to have mail to shield Google [3]. It's an interesting thought, especially considering how half-assed most of these non-core projects are. 1) https://www.google.com/shopping https://www.google.com/shopping 2) https://www.amazon.com/Spark/b?ie=UTF8&node=16907772011 https://www.amazon.com/Spark/b?ie=UTF8&node=16907772011 3) https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-its-email-service https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-... Combine it with the wage collusion case [4] from a few years ago and it's entering the plausible territory 4) http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jobs-settlement-20150903-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-job...
- j-c-hewitt 9y ago
  Actually makes a ton of sense considering that tech company stock prices often move in tandem or are otherwise aggregated together by ETFs and mutual funds. Why not collude off the record to ward off antitrust? It makes stuff like Google+ not completely stupid.
- patentatt 9y ago
  Could also be Amazon pretends to have social media, and then when challenged as being a monopoly they can say something like "well, ecommerce is but one of our many products and across out entire portfolio we have lots of competition" or something to that effect. Just redirect to the sham loser products to make an appearance of competition, even though the lion's share of revenue is derived from a line of business that has a monopoly position.

emodendroket 9y ago

It's not selfless; it's mutually beneficial. Someone looks at the existence of Facebook's core platform, Google+, GMail, and Facebook Mail, and concludes that nothing is amiss, since the bigger products have well-funded competition.

scrooched_moose 9y ago

Google pretends to have shopping [1] to shield Amazon, Amazon pretends to have social media [2] to shield Facebook, Facebook pretended to have mail to shield Google [3]. It's an interesting thought, especially considering how half-assed most of these non-core projects are. 1) https://www.google.com/shopping https://www.google.com/shopping 2) https://www.amazon.com/Spark/b?ie=UTF8&node=16907772011 https://www.amazon.com/Spark/b?ie=UTF8&node=16907772011 3) https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-its-email-service https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-... Combine it with the wage collusion case [4] from a few years ago and it's entering the plausible territory 4) http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jobs-settlement-20150903-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-job...

j-c-hewitt 9y ago
Actually makes a ton of sense considering that tech company stock prices often move in tandem or are otherwise aggregated together by ETFs and mutual funds. Why not collude off the record to ward off antitrust? It makes stuff like Google+ not completely stupid.
patentatt 9y ago
Could also be Amazon pretends to have social media, and then when challenged as being a monopoly they can say something like "well, ecommerce is but one of our many products and across out entire portfolio we have lots of competition" or something to that effect. Just redirect to the sham loser products to make an appearance of competition, even though the lion's share of revenue is derived from a line of business that has a monopoly position.