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The arguments are about stifled competition, rather than direct consumer impact. There's less funding for early startups because it's hard to compete with the G

The arguments are about stifled competition, rather than direct consumer impact. There's less funding for early startups because it's hard to compete with the Giants, and the Giants walk where they want to. As a result, no one gets a chance to do better than the Giants are currently doing... Even if consumers are kinda ok with how things currently are. (Now, it's also pretty easy to imagine breakups going horribly horribly wrong for consumers, precisely because consumers are pretty happy with the state of play. I would hate paying for a calendar app at this point in history, and I would also hate having to comparison shop for one that didn't suck...)

WaltPurvis 8y ago
>it's hard to compete with the Giants, and the Giants walk where they want to. As a result, no one gets a chance to do better than the Giants are currently doing... I'm old enough to remember when Michael Dell said Apple could never compete with giants like Dell and should just dissolve itself and disburse whatever money it had left to shareholders, and almost every business pundit in the world agreed. (I'm sure Michael Dell could tell stories about pundits who said he could never compete against the giant among giants, IBM.) I'm also old enough to remember when pundits said Amazon would never be able to compete with giants like Barnes & Noble and Borders (Borders is a company that doesn't exist anymore, but twenty years ago it was a giant — look it up). I also remember when tiny little Google was nothing more than a feature (search, how boring) that giant Yahoo would obviously just buy or duplicate. And I remember when Netflix's stock price was so depressed you could have bought the entire company for less than the production cost of one summer blockbuster, and everyone was sure it could never survive competing against Blockbuster.com. (Blockbuster is a company that doesn't exist anymore, but fifteen years ago it was a giant – look it up.) It's obviously hard to compete with entrenched giants, but I'm skeptical of any notion that it's any different now than in the past (if anything, it's probably slightly easier these days).

WaltPurvis 8y ago

>it's hard to compete with the Giants, and the Giants walk where they want to. As a result, no one gets a chance to do better than the Giants are currently doing... I'm old enough to remember when Michael Dell said Apple could never compete with giants like Dell and should just dissolve itself and disburse whatever money it had left to shareholders, and almost every business pundit in the world agreed. (I'm sure Michael Dell could tell stories about pundits who said he could never compete against the giant among giants, IBM.) I'm also old enough to remember when pundits said Amazon would never be able to compete with giants like Barnes & Noble and Borders (Borders is a company that doesn't exist anymore, but twenty years ago it was a giant — look it up). I also remember when tiny little Google was nothing more than a feature (search, how boring) that giant Yahoo would obviously just buy or duplicate. And I remember when Netflix's stock price was so depressed you could have bought the entire company for less than the production cost of one summer blockbuster, and everyone was sure it could never survive competing against Blockbuster.com. (Blockbuster is a company that doesn't exist anymore, but fifteen years ago it was a giant – look it up.) It's obviously hard to compete with entrenched giants, but I'm skeptical of any notion that it's any different now than in the past (if anything, it's probably slightly easier these days).