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A company raking in incredible profit is a pretty good sign they are not doing anything special to maintain a monopoly, they just made a really good product and

A company raking in incredible profit is a pretty good sign they are not doing anything special to maintain a monopoly, they just made a really good product and everyone else sucks.

mikrl 2y ago
So apparently the caveat is antitrust are ‘reportedly’ looking at NVIDIA. But from what I’ve seen they haven’t really done anything anti-competitive. They seem like the same company as they were years ago: selling devices, software for the devices and support for the software. Compare to the tech megacorps who have evolved via acquisition, data brokerage and enshittification and always seem to find new ways to pop up and make you roll your eyes.
Barrin92 2y ago
That's not how economics works, the very sign of a monopoly is that companies have market power and can set prices, that's why companies want to have one. Under monopoly conditions profits say precisely nothing about the quality of a product.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Yeah, the profit doesn't mean anything on its own.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to manipulate the market to maintain a monopoly. Product dumping to kill competitors for example. Milking your customers to the max is the opposite of what you'd do to illegally maintain a monopoly.
vlovich123 2y ago
This is a very weird take. In 1998, MSFT announced a 28% increase in revenue with EPS increasing by 35% and ~4B in revenue. MSFT was making incredible revenue and profits for that time and were 100% engaged in practices to maintain their monopoly and extend it to unrelated areas (e.g. internet browsers). For those that don't remember, here's examples of what MSFT did: 1. Kickbacks to computer OEMs to prevent the installation of alternative OSes. Basically buying market share & preventing competition. 2. Embrace, extend, extinguish to take over standards protocols in favor of Microsoft-developed ones. 3. Unnecessarily integrating IE into the OS, making it the default browser, and giving it access to OS APIs to work and perform well that other browsers couldn't do. 4. Leverage their OS to maintain a monopoly in the office suite space and use the office suite to maintain a monopoly in the OS space.
- icedchai 2y ago
  Netscape would crash literally every half hour, on every platform. Was that MSFT's fault? IE actually was the better product at the time.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    Citation needed. https://www.savetz.com/articles/nie11.html https://www.savetz.com/articles/nie11.html is a contemporaneous article that suggests the browsers were pretty equal in terms of stability and speed. The monopoly position Microsoft exploited in their OS to push IE and then business deals and mind share to solidify it by extending web standards in MS-only ways (eg activex) seems to really be the difference.
    - iamthirsty 2y ago
      In your cited source: > Some people say that Netscape is less stable, others that IE is less stable
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        How does that support the claim that IE is more stable and thus the better product?
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Did any of those things change? Other than renaming IE to Edge.
ushiroda80 2y ago
Nvidia has a de facto monopoly on AI hardware and software. The gross margins are clear telltale sign. The real question is are they doing anything anti competitive to unjustly create/maintain their monopoly which on the surface there does not seem to be any evidence of.
- kube-system 2y ago
  Well, we know a couple of things that Nvidia is uniquely positioned to be able to use to prevent others from competing: * they're taking action to prevent others from making other GPUs compatible with CUDA * they're buying up foundry and packaging capacity It's probably likely that there's execs at Nvidia who know these things are good for them and bad for their competitions and have explained it in some internal emails...

A company raking in incredible profit is a pretty good sign they are not doing anything special to maintain a monopoly, they just made a really good product and everyone else sucks.

mikrl 2y ago

So apparently the caveat is antitrust are ‘reportedly’ looking at NVIDIA. But from what I’ve seen they haven’t really done anything anti-competitive. They seem like the same company as they were years ago: selling devices, software for the devices and support for the software. Compare to the tech megacorps who have evolved via acquisition, data brokerage and enshittification and always seem to find new ways to pop up and make you roll your eyes.

Barrin92 2y ago

That's not how economics works, the very sign of a monopoly is that companies have market power and can set prices, that's why companies want to have one. Under monopoly conditions profits say precisely nothing about the quality of a product.

hot_gril 2y ago
Yeah, the profit doesn't mean anything on its own.
bpodgursky 2y ago
It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to manipulate the market to maintain a monopoly. Product dumping to kill competitors for example. Milking your customers to the max is the opposite of what you'd do to illegally maintain a monopoly.

vlovich123 2y ago

This is a very weird take. In 1998, MSFT announced a 28% increase in revenue with EPS increasing by 35% and ~4B in revenue. MSFT was making incredible revenue and profits for that time and were 100% engaged in practices to maintain their monopoly and extend it to unrelated areas (e.g. internet browsers). For those that don't remember, here's examples of what MSFT did: 1. Kickbacks to computer OEMs to prevent the installation of alternative OSes. Basically buying market share & preventing competition. 2. Embrace, extend, extinguish to take over standards protocols in favor of Microsoft-developed ones. 3. Unnecessarily integrating IE into the OS, making it the default browser, and giving it access to OS APIs to work and perform well that other browsers couldn't do. 4. Leverage their OS to maintain a monopoly in the office suite space and use the office suite to maintain a monopoly in the OS space.

icedchai 2y ago
Netscape would crash literally every half hour, on every platform. Was that MSFT's fault? IE actually was the better product at the time.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Citation needed. https://www.savetz.com/articles/nie11.html https://www.savetz.com/articles/nie11.html is a contemporaneous article that suggests the browsers were pretty equal in terms of stability and speed. The monopoly position Microsoft exploited in their OS to push IE and then business deals and mind share to solidify it by extending web standards in MS-only ways (eg activex) seems to really be the difference.
  - iamthirsty 2y ago
    In your cited source: > Some people say that Netscape is less stable, others that IE is less stable
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      How does that support the claim that IE is more stable and thus the better product?
hot_gril 2y ago
Did any of those things change? Other than renaming IE to Edge.

ushiroda80 2y ago

Nvidia has a de facto monopoly on AI hardware and software. The gross margins are clear telltale sign. The real question is are they doing anything anti competitive to unjustly create/maintain their monopoly which on the surface there does not seem to be any evidence of.

kube-system 2y ago
Well, we know a couple of things that Nvidia is uniquely positioned to be able to use to prevent others from competing: * they're taking action to prevent others from making other GPUs compatible with CUDA * they're buying up foundry and packaging capacity It's probably likely that there's execs at Nvidia who know these things are good for them and bad for their competitions and have explained it in some internal emails...