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There is a difference between leveraging a monopoly to create a new offering in a different product area (increasing competition) and leveraging it to lock user
by scottmp10 15y ago
There is a difference between leveraging a monopoly to create a new offering in a different product area (increasing competition) and leveraging it to lock users into another of your products (decreasing competition).
By locking users into IE, Microsoft was decreasing competition. Google, by pumping resources into Android and Chrome, is increasing competition.
- saurik 15y agoYou are not increasing competition if you are subsidizing that product offering and giving it away for free: you are messing with (and sometimes even destroying) another market. Example: when Google gives away Google Voice service, that is a horribly bad thing for that market. There are tons of competitors in that space that have fundamentally better service, but competing with /free/ is so serious of a barrier to entry in the mind of a user that you have to be like mind-blowingly-ultra-horribly better, which isn't even really possible. Google Voice is an aberration in the market caused by an unrelated monopoly.