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> Auth0 is the most prominent alternative that customers consider when evaluating Okta. The acquisition of Auth0 eliminates that threat and grants Okta pricing
by cwkoss 6y ago
> Auth0 is the most prominent alternative that customers consider when evaluating Okta. The acquisition of Auth0 eliminates that threat and grants Okta pricing power as a result.
"Grants pricing power" is such a euphemistic phrase for "solidifying a monopoly will let them price gouge"
- xapata 6y agoOr "monopolistic price gouging" is a dysphemism for having a stable business in a tough market. They need to make enough profit to avoid capital outflow.
- tsimionescu 6y agoBuying a competitor is always a dubious move towards monopoly. If the ideal free market is supposed to have all sorts of advantages, then anything which reduces the ideal-ness of the actual market must be viewed as negative.
- xapata 6y agoNo, that logic doesn't hold. Further, I think you're conflating two meanings of the word ideal. In the context of an ideal free market, the meaning is closer to hypothetical and is pretty far away from the sense of ethical or practical goodness. Also, it's not clear that an "ideal" free market is a stable equilibrium. And lastly, if an ideal free market permits the existence of corporations (I'm not sure that it does) then it must allow one to purchase another.
- xapata 6y agoSeems like I should have better explained why the logic doesn't hold. Even if we grant that an ideal market is a good thing (which is debatable), it's still not certain that all motion towards an ideal market is positive good. The space through which one moves may not be monotonically increasing in the goodness direction.
- hinkley 6y agoExcept now they have to make an extra half billion a year just to justify spending the money instead of putting it into a more liquid investment. Or themselves.
- LeonB 6y agoWhat do you mean by “capital outflow” here? Do you just mean “spending” or something more?
- xapata 6y agoNot spending. Disinvestment, or the refusal to reinvest, either way meaning that the capital flows elsewhere.
- oppositelock 6y agoLuckily, we have alternatives, so their pricing shenanigans can only push people so far. For example, Keycloak is some self-hosted open source software which is a drop-in replacement for any Oauth2/OpenID Connect service. It doesn't get you a nice applications panel like Okta does, but it's a workable alternative. Given what I spend on Okta, prices doubling would put me on the fence, and tripling would move me to an alternative. I do use both - Okta for internal users, and Auth0 for customer accounts, and I'm bummed that the quick and easy (Auth0) is being subsumed by the stuffy enterprise company.
- BurningFrog 6y agoThe Economist response is that Okta just rewarded their competition with $6.5B. This is a serious incentive for anyone to launch a new company in the field.
- bsder 6y agoI have been beating the drum for a straightforward hardware key-based identity system for 5-50 users here for years. And, yet, everything is still a pain in the ass. We were looking at Auth0 precisely because Okta was doing the enterprisy thing. Sigh.
- ezekg 6y agoWhat do you mean by a key-based identity system? I've never heard that before, or perhaps I just don't know that term.
- gnud 6y ago'hardware key-based', not just 'key-based'. Which presumably means that all authentication is done via hardware keys (like yubi or similar).
- stavros 6y agoLike WebAuthn?
- gscho 6y agoWhat's wrong with Yubikey?
- bsder 6y agoThe keys are fine. The system the keys are a part of, not so much. I want to hand anybody in my company 3 keys each (normal, backup, and emergency) and I want them to log into everything with those keys. This is so mind-bendingly difficult to implement that I simply give up every time I try. After you kill yourself putting it all together, you can generally make logging in with the keys sorta work. And then you have to cancel and replace a key that somebody lost. And then you realize all the corner edge cases that don't work. Or, somebody leaves your company and they're the administrator for something on GitHub and now you can't transfer it without their help. And, if you've destroyed the keys, you're shit out of luck. Anything to do with keys is second-class relative to the password flow because that's what everybody uses.
- justaguy88 6y agoWhy is this legal?
- xapata 6y agoReverse that: How could one prove that Okta now has, but did not previously have monopoly power?
- chii 6y agomarketshare grew to a size which allows them to dictate pricing.
- xapata 6y agoPricing power is proportional, it's not a binary state.
- jbluepolarbear 6y agoWhy does it have to be a monopoly to be illegal? They have the largest market share, bought their #1 competitor, and now have very few competitors capable of competing.
- tus89 6y agoIsn't this how disruptive little startups get their foot in the door?