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Amazon is the one that continues to amaze me. People forget the original pitch to investors was _LOSE_ money for 5 years until they either drove competitors ou
by mech422 8y ago
Amazon is the one that continues to amaze me. People forget the original pitch to investors was _LOSE_ money for 5 years until they either drove competitors out of business, or became the single largest e-commerce provider. I've never understood how this was legal. It seems like the definition of 'anti-competitive' and 'predatory'? If Microsoft gave a free computer with every purchase of windows, and could afford to continue the practice until Apple, Dell, etc. went bankrupt - would that be ok ?
- root_axis 8y agoSounds ok to me. I think the consumer would be very happy with 200 dollar PCs that were comparable in quality to thousand dollar machines.
- lswainemoore 8y agoOk...but the point is that after they achieve the monopoly they can jack up the price to well over a thousand dollars without worrying about losing market share.
- edanm 8y agoAt which point why would wouldn't a new company form to compete with them? They probably couldn't kill the market forever, and it would be very expensive to try this and fail.
- pas 8y agoThat'd be the illegal part of being a monopoly. The antitrust laws work by restricting (penalizing) monopolies from abusing their market position/dominance. Basically, it's not a problem if you happen to be the best in computers. But it's a big no-no to try to force resellers into exclusive contracts and so on. (If you continue to just buy up newcomers to the market that's not a problem, after all investors can just keep funding new competitors and you have to waste money.) But of course this is a very difficult problem at the intersection of economics, politics, law and sociology.