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An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
- moltar 6y agoSubstack = Medium x LinkedIn
- qz2 6y agoThat’s one pretty large shite multiplier.
- shash7 6y agoLmao
- baby 6y agoYeah I’m confused. What is this substack and how did it become so prevalent so fast? Or maybe there are more substack posts on HN these days?
- pjc50 6y agoFrom the Google summary: > Substack makes it simple for a writer to start an email newsletter that makes money from subscriptions. Like medium, it's a way for writers to get paid. There seems to be popular tech and business writing there. HN's own patio11 is a fan.
- abhinav22 6y agoSubstack is invested in by YCombinator
- arthurcolle 6y agoA lot of hate for Substack, probably because of how fucked up Medium became. But honestly, the Substack model is much nicer: 1) you arent charged if youre a writer, de facto. 2) yes, they provide stuff that costs money if you want to use them (custom subdomains cost a one time fixed cost of $50) 3) you, as a content creator, can choose if you want to enable monetization, at which point the readers must pay to read your content, but still - you arent explicitly charged to post stuff (which is what happens in the Medium model, implicitly). one thing Substack should do is enable webhooks so that if you are running a webapp and you want to give your paid subscribers access to an 'exclusive blog', you can tell substack that user X with email addr Y is a paid subscriber to MyService ABC, and then instead of requiring payments to Substack, it would just let them through. Not sure how the user/unit economics would work here, but I enabled a Substack blog for a new SaaS I'm building, and I want to make it pay-only, but I'm already using Stripe to handle subscriptions/payments and I don't want my users to have to pay twice in order to see the blog (while already paying for the APIs and services provided by the site.) and also use the service web app as well as the service web API. @cjbest, @sethbannon, @pg if youre listening I think this would be a good thing to prioritize: webhook to allow subscribers for X's SaaS/startup/whatever to be implicitly include in the set of "paying Substack users" instead of requiring some app's user to pay a second time (for some non-egregious fee, maybe a small percentage of the user subsription fee for X's pricing model. Maybe even Stripe & Substack could chat about a bidirectional integration to make this seamless, and even bake in some of the costs). if you like these ideas you should totally reach me at the addresses listed on my keybase on my profile, I am super awesome and its 4:24am EST (my location) so clearly I'm motivated. Cheers
- totetsu 6y agoRNZ: Mediawatch: Substack - the platform that boomed under Covid-19 https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018777816/substack-the-platform-that-boomed-under-covid-19 https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2...
- Throwaway1771 6y agoLinkedIn ÷ Medium
- ralph84 6y agoThe article vastly underestimates the desire of large enterprises to deal with only a handful of IT vendors. Sure, no enterprise wants monopoly pricing, but they also don’t want dozens upon dozens of different IT vendors to deal with.
- fakename11 6y agoDozens of IT vendors sounds like a security risk.
- dtech 6y agoAh, the ever-common excuse from corporate IT to avoid any work or change: "it's not secure". If you add these I'll have bingo: * "We already have X for this" (X is only vaguely related and/or does it far, far inferior) * "it's too expensive" (said by $200/hour consultant vetoing $50/month SaaS) * "it doesn't conform to the architecture" (used for anything that isn't Java and Microsoft Office)
- whimsicalism 6y agoDon't know how you work in a major tech company without having dozens of vendors...
- MattGaiser 6y agoYou want to tackle monopoly power? Find a way to make purchasing accept other vendors.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoWhere I work, software purchasing is outsourced to a third-party company. I can appreciate the value this provides. And part of the reason why I hate the trend of turning everything into services is that regular (middle-class and below) people don't get to outsource the increasing amount of relationships they have to enter into.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
- cafed00d 6y ago> it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas. I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas. I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. Otherwise, we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together — it’a going to be a minor pain in the butt to email <user@outlook.com> with the pdf tchalla@ shared on Slack; deal with formatted paste/copy & whatever else issues. I mean, products being integrated is the whole MO of companies like Apple, Tesla and literally every other company making physical things. Sure, you can sacrifice the integration for other features like breadth of choice, specialized user needs etc, but proposing regulations to keep them distinct and separate?! That modesty sound right, imho
- Hammershaft 6y agoAn off the cuff idea I haven't really thought through the implications of: What if these (somewhat arbitrary) product categories were enforced, but instead of preventing different products from integrating, we mandated they be composable over documented APIs? That way we could get some of the benefits of integration, but without the intensely anti competitive nature of walled garden apps?
- weego 6y agoThe net result would be Govt vs Megacorps tied up in a decade of litigation arguing what the terms 'composable' and 'API' mean
- Hammershaft 6y agoAs opposed to decades of companies and governments arguing in court what constitutes a monopoly? I mean, composability would just be the intended net result, not a part of the legal framework of the mandate. I think you could also avoid using the word API entirely. I could see the end result being similiar to how default app selection works in Android. That said, I still haven't sat down and thought through the unintended side effects.
- willyg123 6y agoMatt Stoller has published dozens of whiny posts about supposed monopolies. Yet, he has yet to once mention the "consumer welfare standard" [1] because it would blow the thesis apart in every single post. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amattstoller.substack.com%2C+consumer+welfare+standard&oq=site%3Amattstoller.substack.com%2C+consumer+welfare+standard&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.7464j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amattstoller.substack....
- rmrfstar 6y agoHe mentions it all the time. The index to his book has 11 references to the "consumer rights movement". A central premise of his book is that the "Watergate babies" shifted antitrust law from a focus on democratic control of corporate power to so-called "consumer rights".
- dalbasal 6y agoAlso, looking at antitrust purely through a price lens is extremely narrow, and practically unintelligible in most big-ticket modern examples. In the netscape-msft case, prices didn't even exist. They don't exist or aren't central in a whole lot of modern businesses. How do you analyze FB in terms of the CWS model? It's like trying to examine the health of a rose bush by taking its temperature. It's a pretty good example of intellectual failure in economics, compounded by legislative/industry agendas. Defining reality using a model rather than the other way around. The model is good at measuring market power of something like a centralized buyer of agricultural commodities. The more unlike an agricultural cartel the industry, the lower the "evidence" for monopoly.
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- dredmorbius 6y agoAn excellent backgrounder on how the shift to an exclusive focus on "consumer welfare" came to be, watch or listen to "This is Neoibeeralism": https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLATIVW2S3zKMbVlnAHAPR0sHZisHJl4fd https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLATIVW2S3zKMbVlnAHAPR0sHZ... Bork's tedious tome on antitrust was birthed directly from Aaron Director's Antitrust Project at the University of Chicago. (Bork credits Director fatuously in his introductin.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Director https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Director
- jakozaur 6y agoI'm not sure who is benefitting those mega managers other than executives or shareholders. We need to find a way to discourage mega-mergers. Either through antitrust law or progressive taxation on mega mergers starting at few $1Bln. 1. The economy is a whole losses efficiency due to lack of competition. 2. Less competition for talent. 3. More fragile economy (e.g. too big to fail). https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/11/15/across-the-west-powerful-firms-are-becoming-even-more-powerful https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/11/15/across-t... https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-the-u-s-economy https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...
- minikites 6y agoIt doesn't benefit anyone outside the groups you mention, you're right. Many people outside those groups are lured by the false promise that they too could make it into one of those groups, so they work against their own interest. http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/ http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/
- mrkramer 6y ago"We need to find a way to discourage mega-mergers." Why? If YouTube or Instagram didn't get acquired, Google and Facebook would find a way to destroy them just like Microsoft did to Netscape and they wouldn't exist anymore but in essence they are great products and there are no other products like them on the market. Once they get destroyed there is less competition and at least when they are alive you can look up to them for quality of service and motivation to compete.
- alexfromapex 6y agoThis is another antitrust problem, not necessarily an argument in favor of large orgs.
- badconvincer 6y agoI don’t know. I’m feeling the need for large gatekeepers especially in the media space. I have lost faith in the public’s ability to make reasoned decisions for themselves.
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- kieranmaine 6y agoIf people are interested in getting more data on why monopolies and monopsonies are bad I'd recommend "The Myth Of Capitalism" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40751646-the-myth-of-capitalism https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40751646-the-myth-of-...). It made a compelling case for breaking up large corporations in the interest of reducing inequality (via more competition and reduced consumer prices). However, it's the only book I've read on the subject so am unsure if it's a widely held and reliably informed view. For commenters that are wondering what world we'd be living in with functional anti-trust laws, the book suggests we look to the US between the late 1930's and the early 1980s.
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