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> The lock-in to Facebook is much, much lighter. WHAT? Pardon, but I don't see at all how you could come to such a conclusion. The primary assets of Windows ar

> The lock-in to Facebook is much, much lighter. WHAT? Pardon, but I don't see at all how you could come to such a conclusion. The primary assets of Windows are: ease-of-use, ubiquity, hardware compatibility. But if you have an application you love that works on Windows, chances are (if it's not a game, but even then there are other games and entertainment software) that there is a port or clone for another system (like Linux or Mac OS X — I'm speaking consumer-grade stuff here, business is another matter entirely.) Facebook on the other hand has these assets: your Mom's on Facebook, your dad's on Facebook, so is your neighbour, your aunt, all your friends, (ex-)class mates, acquaintances, that boy or girl you had a crush on in first grade… Your social graph is much more difficult to migrate to a different social platform than it is to port an application from one OS to another (or to find it on the Net.) Because it is pretty much impossible. Mass-migrations sort-of happen (like StudiVZ → Facebook a while back in Germany, or Digg → reddit, but there the social cohesion was rather low,) but only in high pressure situations. You can't easily bring about such a situation without the point of origin of said migration fucking up in a major way. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr — they're all sitting on social gold, and they're keeping it for now.

mseebach 14y ago
Easy on the drama, please. Monopoly means that there is only a single seller of a given commodity. Windows was a monopoly in the 1990s and until I guess around when OS X came out - these alternative applications you mention didn't exist yet. Today I wouldn't say Windows is a monopoly, partly because good-enough alternative applications exists, partly because many (most) new, fancy applications are web-based and not limited to IE (as they once were). Today, really, there is really only one reason to run Windows, and it's Office - and that's going away fast, especially as users dawn on the fact that they can communicate without e-mailing Word documents around. Another important component of Windows monopoly is exclusivity. Today I can trivially run Windows in a VM for that fraction of my workflow that isn't properly supported on Mac or Linux - 10 years ago, the best you could do was dual booting, which was painful and tricky for non-technical users. Which brings me to Facebook: No, you can't port your social network lock, stock and barrel to a competing service. But you can trivially, with very little friction, maintain your presence on multiple networks - all you need is another tab in your browser, or a client app that supports each. You can even use the APIs of the respective services to integrate them with each other - you can automatically post Tweets to Facebook and vise versa. Plenty of people I know use both Facebook and Twitter in parallel with various degrees of automated integration. That's not the face of a monopoly. The fact that other people don't want to stop using Facebook does not make Facebook a monopoly. They have strong network effects, yes, but that's not the same.

mseebach 14y ago

Easy on the drama, please. Monopoly means that there is only a single seller of a given commodity. Windows was a monopoly in the 1990s and until I guess around when OS X came out - these alternative applications you mention didn't exist yet. Today I wouldn't say Windows is a monopoly, partly because good-enough alternative applications exists, partly because many (most) new, fancy applications are web-based and not limited to IE (as they once were). Today, really, there is really only one reason to run Windows, and it's Office - and that's going away fast, especially as users dawn on the fact that they can communicate without e-mailing Word documents around. Another important component of Windows monopoly is exclusivity. Today I can trivially run Windows in a VM for that fraction of my workflow that isn't properly supported on Mac or Linux - 10 years ago, the best you could do was dual booting, which was painful and tricky for non-technical users. Which brings me to Facebook: No, you can't port your social network lock, stock and barrel to a competing service. But you can trivially, with very little friction, maintain your presence on multiple networks - all you need is another tab in your browser, or a client app that supports each. You can even use the APIs of the respective services to integrate them with each other - you can automatically post Tweets to Facebook and vise versa. Plenty of people I know use both Facebook and Twitter in parallel with various degrees of automated integration. That's not the face of a monopoly. The fact that other people don't want to stop using Facebook does not make Facebook a monopoly. They have strong network effects, yes, but that's not the same.