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While I agree to some extend with the author, he too is making large leaps without truly backing them up. He's fighting over semantics. While Warren may be wr
by monster2control 8y ago
While I agree to some extend with the author, he too is making large leaps without truly backing them up. He's fighting over semantics. While Warren may be wrong in her history, she's not truly wrong in the results. Amazon does exactly what she says, Amazon sees a Marketplace item is selling really well, so they start to sell it too at or slightly cheaper.
The reason people tend to use Google over Yelp as in his example isn't really choice, but a lot of times because people don't know. My mother as an example has no idea of the difference between Google and the internet, they are the same thing to her if Google promoted Yelp and other restaurant review sites over their own, she might use them, but she only knows what google shows her. This is a lot more common than people with an understanding of tech realize for the average consumer.
Google's business should be that, advertising and showing accurate search results. But they need people to stay on their pages longer, so that they get more ad dollars, so they start duplicating other popular sites to maintain the user's attention. They are in a position of power that no other company has, and when they decide they are going to compete with your idea, they have a completely unfair advantage, strictly because they have become, to many, the Gatekeepers of the Web. They also provide the most popular Web Browser, which defaults to Google. Think that's fair? Think the average consumer knows any better.
His discussion of the Microsoft Antitrust is also a little dumb, while a computer coming bundled with a Web browser does make it more useful, it was the way that Microsoft did it, to ensure their only competition had no real way of competing by using their dominance to make the web a IE only land. Proprietary Web API that only worked in IE that didn't follow the standard meant a lot of early developers only targeted IE because it was too hard or expensive to target Netscape too. This was the heart of the antitrust, and while Google may have emerged non-the-less, we would not have Firefox or probably even chrome and they Web would definitely not be what it is today, because Microsoft didn't foster innovation on the Web, that was thanks to Mozilla and other open-source browsers. The web might have eventually become what it is today, but most experts agree Microsoft is a large part of the reason we aren't farther ahead because they killed competition at the drop of a hat. The author seems to forget how bleak and shitty the web was when IE was the only choice and Microsoft didn't update IE from version 6 for almost 5 years, when they finally released the garbage that was IE 7.
Tech is a much different beast and while Warren could certainly use some help to clarify her reasons for wanting to break up these tech giants, she's not completely wrong either. However, big tech isn't where her focus should be completely. Comcast, ATT, Version. These companies essentially control the internet backbone and are monopolies in many areas. Consumers have little to no competition for how they get internet access and that's one of the biggest issues.
- dnautics 8y agoIt wasn't Microsoft's meddling with the browser that was it's major anticompetitive sin; it was it's control over the bootloader. https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago>Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer. Are you sure about that?
- oflannabhra 8y agoiOS and Android have far more active devices that Windows 10. As pointed out in the article, Microsoft missed the mobile revolution, and computing has shifted to mobile devices.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoAnd when those users need to sit down at a computer to do actual work... It's by far dominantly a Windows PC. You can't just take mobile and give it equal representation to PC, servers, workstations, etc. It's it's own thing. Did Windows lose mobile, of course. Do mobile users exclusively use Android or IOS and not use Windows - no.
- dnautics 8y ago> those users need to sit down at a computer to do actual work Not all people sit down to do work, and even those that do have more devices than they do desktops.
- re-actor 8y agoWindows still hovers around 90% market share, how is that not dominant?