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> Were we not excited here yesterday on HN, that Cloudflare is cloning and undercutting AWS S3? I think there's a bit of a difference there. 1) There's an imp

by mdasen 5y ago

> Were we not excited here yesterday on HN, that Cloudflare is cloning and undercutting AWS S3? I think there's a bit of a difference there. 1) There's an important difference between winner-take-all (or most) markets with very strong network effects and other markets. If most people use S3 and I use R2, it doesn't really damage my experience using R2. Let's say that Facebook was cloning features, but all platforms could interact with standard, open APIs (like the S3 API basically is). Then we wouldn't care about Facebook copying. In a Fediverse-like world, we don't care about someone cloning the features of a competitor because their cloning doesn't stifle competition. 2) I think there's a difference between a new company challenging the 10,000lb gorilla and the 10,000lb gorilla crushing a new company. Cloudflare isn't tiny, but they're definitely tiny compared to AWS. When Facebook talks about cloning the features of a tiny competitor, it comes off as the giant trillion-dollar company trying to crush any tiny competitor that might serve customers better. With Cloudflare's R2, we see a smaller company cloning something which adds competition and puts pressure on the larger competitors to treat their customers better. Maybe AWS won't respond, but at least we can use R2 when we want to. Maybe AWS will respond with free bandwidth. Even better! When Facebook does this, it feels very different - especially given the antipathy that many people feel toward Facebook and its policies/behaviors. Let's say that NewSocial comes up with something that seems to be resonating with customers. They only have a million users right now, but people like the feature(s) and they like that NewSocial doesn't seem to have the baggage/policies/behaviors that people don't like about Facebook. Consumers might be getting a better option that treats them better...and Facebook wants to clone the features to blunt their growth and prevent that new option from getting the critical mass to be sustainable so it dies out. Note: I'm not passing judgement on Facebook's policies/behaviors. I am simply noting that there does seem to be some antipathy in the public toward Facebook. I don't think that people are against cloning features. I think that people are against large companies cloning features in an attempt to stifle competition and prevent consumer choice. When Cloudflare clones S3, it benefits us as consumers and as internet users. We see that R2 could allow new startups to offer cool things to us that might not be affordable given Amazon's bandwidth pricing. When we look at Facebook cloning features from tiny startups, we see our world being locked into the Facebook ecosystem while the company tries to destroy any competition that might offer us something better.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
This punching down concern highlights how broken anti trust enforcement is. When companies have more resources than whole countries they're advantages make competing in any remotely related endeavors high risk. Unless of course being bought out is the only goal. But even in that case the 800lbs gorilla may still prefer to do it themselves and swallow the market.
- ralfn 5y ago
  >When companies have more resources than whole countries This is the part that scares me. Not the amount of resources, but the shitty quality that still comes out of those processes. I suppose scaling up organisations is even harder than scaling up infrastructure. This example is actually great, because Whatsapp won the market anyway, with a small team against "more resources than whole countries". Facebook ended up buying it. Remember how Google lost to youtube and had to buy it too? To me it seems large organisations use anti competitive behavior to be able to compete against smaller entities, because when it comes to quality large organisations just can't compete against smaller ones. Or why large chain restaurants generally don't win michelin stars. And even the successful stuff by large companies tend to be small teams. Think Google Maps or Gmail, which were created by small independent teams. If the whole company could mess with those products they would have likely failed.

by mdasen 5y ago

paulryanrogers 5y ago

This punching down concern highlights how broken anti trust enforcement is. When companies have more resources than whole countries they're advantages make competing in any remotely related endeavors high risk. Unless of course being bought out is the only goal. But even in that case the 800lbs gorilla may still prefer to do it themselves and swallow the market.

ralfn 5y ago
>When companies have more resources than whole countries This is the part that scares me. Not the amount of resources, but the shitty quality that still comes out of those processes. I suppose scaling up organisations is even harder than scaling up infrastructure. This example is actually great, because Whatsapp won the market anyway, with a small team against "more resources than whole countries". Facebook ended up buying it. Remember how Google lost to youtube and had to buy it too? To me it seems large organisations use anti competitive behavior to be able to compete against smaller entities, because when it comes to quality large organisations just can't compete against smaller ones. Or why large chain restaurants generally don't win michelin stars. And even the successful stuff by large companies tend to be small teams. Think Google Maps or Gmail, which were created by small independent teams. If the whole company could mess with those products they would have likely failed.