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In my very humble opinion, services that are offered for free should also be investigated for anti-trust practices. Google comes up with Gmail - phenomenally be
by 8ytecoder 7y ago
In my very humble opinion, services that are offered for free should also be investigated for anti-trust practices. Google comes up with Gmail - phenomenally better than other services of its time - kills all viable competition and the let it languish or even degrades the experience. No one can compete with free. Result is that email as a platform is slowly languishing with no real improvements.
- d1zzy 7y agoSo as a company better to just not provide a great free service or a service that is largely better than the competition because if it's too successful then you get blamed for not keeping it updated.
- aviraldg 7y agoIf you kill off free and ad supported services[0], you take away the ability of a large fraction of the world's population to use the internet. People using 3-4 USD/month prepaid internet packs to communicate using Facebook and Whatsapp, and these days, even finding jobs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346) HN's default position of "burn the ads with fire", therefore, has always struck me as a very privileged position that fails to take into account users from all around the world. And guess what? If the kind of people who usually post here succeed in forcing through that opinion, that is what most of the world will have to deal with too, since Silicon Valley drives so much of tech. [0] Although, it is unlikely that advertisers are really targeting the kind of users I'm talking about, so in effect these users are being subsidized by others.
- 8ytecoder 7y agoWhatsApp’s original model was $1 a year. That would have been a reasonable fee even for most developing countries. Job posting sites make money from the poster and don’t have to be ad supported.
- ballark 7y agoWhat would a $1 a year model do in terms of opening the market up to competition? That seems like the worst of both worlds, no additional competition, and we make these difficult for those without much money.
- scarface74 7y agoWere they profitable with that model?
- snovv_crash 7y agoThey only had 30 employees when they were acquired. I'd say yes.
- scarface74 7y agoSo I guess we should ban HN....
- cromwellian 7y agoYahoo and Hotmail were the market leaders offering free email at the time. They set the price to $0 first.